Alexa says Google is king, but not in mail

by Craig Raw

Alexa fills an unusual role in the web space. Ignored by some as misleading, it nevertheless is like a candle in a dark cave - not perfect, but much better than nothing. As author of the SearchStatus extension, I have some affiliation, and Geoff Mack of Alexa has even been kind enough to link to SearchStatus from alexa.com. Geoff also keeps a blog, and his last post is very illuminating. He points us to a comparison between Yahoo, MSN and Google, who rule the world in traffic, and in that order, although they are fairly close in standing.  
                                                   
What makes it really interesting though, is that if you look at the breakdowns for Yahoo, MSN, and Google, you will see that most of the former's traffic come from webmail (Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail respectively), while most of Google's traffic comes from search.
 
So, from this we can deduce 2 facts:

1) That Google remains the kingpin of search, by quite some margin.
2) That despite all those shiny new @gmail.com addresses, Gmail remains a relatively small player in the webmail world.

Which just goes to show that the net at large doesn't change as fast as some might say. Can we trust these results? I think that, especially in this case, the sheer number of hits involved leads to a realistic picture statistically.

Definitely one to watch.

2005/07/28 | permalink | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

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