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MSN leads shopping engines; Google tops general search engines

August 04, 2006 |

Google scored significantly higher than Yahoo and MSN’s general engines, its closest competitors according to a new Jupiter Research. But that picture changed in the comparison of shopping engines to other shopping engines.

In a study of search engines from Jupiter Research, Google leads the other general engines in unique visitors, frequency of visits and intensity, defined as the number of pages on the site accessed per month. Google scored significantly higher that Yahoo and MSN’s general engines, its closest competitors in Jupiter’s CORE Index (composite online rating of effectiveness), which rates the ability of both general and dedicated shopping search engines to attract, retain and direct searchers to commerce sites.

But that picture changed in the comparison of shopping engines to other shopping engines, according to the report, “Shopping Search CORE – Shopping Engines Top General Engines in Use Intensity.” Yahoo Shopping scored highest in the number of unique visitors, while MSN Shopping scored highest in the frequency of visits and PriceGrabber.com scored highest in the intensity index.

Jupiter’s report notes that Google traffic grew 49% since it was last tracked by the research firm in 2004, while Yahoo’s grew 13%. Traffic at both general search engines AOL and Ask.com grew 8% over the same period. MSN is the only general search engine indexed to have lost traffic during that time. Among dedicated shopping search engines, growth has been more modest. Since 2004, traffic at PriceGrabber.com is up only 16%, MSN Shopping’s is up only 10%.

Jupiter notes that the shopping search engines with the highest unique visitor scores aren’t necessarily tops in frequency, which suggest the opportunity to build affinity at those engines for incoming traffic.

Source: Internet Retailer

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