tales from the central european web

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Which Hungarian Search Engines are Used the Most

This graph was a result of an analysis I made a few months ago: it shows the number of referrers by search engines and directories based on the results of 26 randomly selected publicly available web statistics in August, 2005 .

It is obvious how Google (google.co.hu) outperformed all of its rivals, and also interesting that the organic referrers from the other three Big Engines (Yahoo!, MSN Search, Ask Jeeves) were virtually nowhere.

The second place was taken by startlap.hu pages, which is not a search engine but a conglomerate of one-page subdomains with topic based link collections. The suprisingly high traffic coming from these sites reflects the usability of this system.

The third place was occupied by kurzor.hu, but this also has to do something with Google's popularity, as you might have readed about it.

The last perceptible bar on this diagram belongs to vizsla24.hu, which is the search engine of Hungary's biggest portal: [origo].

To sum it up: Google is far the most popular search engine when it comes to searching among Hungarian sites. Practically nobody uses MSN Search (which has Hungarian interface, and searches can be restricted to Hungarian) and Yahoo! Search (without translated interface but restrictable searches) , while Ask Jeeves is unknown here. The user base of the regional engines is also small, and the only Hungarian site with big influence on referrals is a link collection.

Another interesting aspect is that there are three search engines who continously make a lot of efforts to crawl and index the Hungarian web without any substantial benefit: Yahoo! Search, MSN Search, and Jyxo. These three robots frequently visit Hungarian sites, but basically nobody retrieves the data collected by them. Yahoo! Search sold its service to a regional site at least, MSN Search could quickly become popular thanks to its omnipotent owner: Microsoft, but zoohoo.hu, --the only Hungarian site where Jyxo's data is used-- will most likely remain an (undeservedly) unknown site.

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