Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

I don't give a lot of credence to Alexa rankings unless we're talking about the top 10,000 sites or so. Beyond that the numbers are too easy to manipulate. A collegue referred me to Alexaholic, which is a site that uses Alexa's API to provide comparative graphs of whichever sites you choose. I tried a few obvious ones to see how it worked and found the 5-year trend for Google, Yahoo, and MSN very interesting. With Google's current position, it's easy to forget that Google used to be the new kid on the block. That's some pretty serious growth, wow! Check it out Also, keep in mind that the Alexa numbers take total portal traffic into account, so even though it looks like Yahoo and MSN are currently close behind Google (you'll see Yahoo is actually ahead of Google), that includes users who are using all the other content and services on Yahoo and MSN, while Googlers are still primarily searching the web.