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Aaron Wall has written a thorough and unflattering overview of Yahoo search traffic following the release of search numbers that show Yahoo gets well over half its search volume from its partners.

Aaron discusses how this impacts arbitrage and motivates poor quality. Though possibly just a little harsh, it is worth reading and keeping in mind.

Recent numbers from Efficient Frontier show that Yahoo has nearly three times more search partners than Google - funny given Google has over three times more search volume. And as Aaron notes direct search converts “nearly twice” more than partner search traffic.

Not good numbers moving forward in a battle for the search industry. But I always managed to convert Yahoo traffic at a better CPA than Google in the financial vertical. So maybe there are niches where Yahoo benefits from its partners…. will have to keep track of this one.

Nielsen Online has released data showing that Wikipedia’s 8,000% growth in the past 5 years is attributed to search. Really? Is that what happens when Google ranks all of your pages as #1? I had no idea.

Breaking down the not-at-all suprising data:

Google sent the most search traffic to en.wikipedia.org with 61% of searches on home computers and 66% of work computers. Yahoo came in second at 19% home, 16% work. The main www.Wikipedia.org came in third, beating out MSN and AOL at home and search.MSN.com and search.Live.com at work.

Wikipedia’s growth is slowing, however. Here’s data for unique visitors in the month of April for the past six years with the year-over-year growth percentages:

2003 700,000, n/a
2004 2,082,000, 197%
2005 6,753,000, 224%
2006 25,970,000, 285%
2007 45,934,000 77%
2008 55,820,000 17%

Related Reading:
Powerset Launches Piggybackipedia: Wikipedia Search Engine
Wikipedia External Links Now “Nofollow”
Ten Reasons Marketers Should Pay Attention to Wikipedia

Direct navigation and type-in traffic boast the highest conversion rates of any type of search traffic. But not in every case. Take Eliot Spitzer’s for example.

Minutes after news broke about Governor Spitzer’s alleged involvement with a prostitution ring, domains related to the scandal began selling like hot cakes. According to Wired Blog, domains such as Client9.com have been snatched up since the New York Times went live with the story on Monday and (unlike EmperorsClubVIP.com) they can’t monetize the traffic they receive.

Room871.com, purchased last October, has been listed for sale at $750. Anyone expecting huge profits from these domains could be in for a rude awakening.

Nick Galbreth, a software engineer who purchased Client9.com, has made just $11, though he estimates having invested 8 hours of work into the domain.

Chris Potoski, on the other hand, is using the scandal to redirect traffic to his already established adult content sites. He’s already gained 11 members from the marketing effort. Of course, he’s not sharing the names of his new clients.

Google Android software stack: Google’s gift to the telcos. Or Trojan Horse? Adam Soroca, GM of Jumptap, sees dangers in mobile operators inviting Google inside their castle walls.

With Sprint sprinting to join the Open Handset Alliance and T-mobile mobilizing to ride the Android wave, who will own the valuable search real estate on mobile phone [...]

While the search marketing industry has done much growing in the last few years, it’s also lagging behind other industries in certain areas. One thing the industry lacks is credible information about salary and structure of in-house search marketing teams. Part of this is due to the esoteric nature of the job compared to other [...]

The return of Led Zeppelin is a great thing, and it’s generated a lot of search traffic.  In terms of the benefit to one company, though, an announcement related to the iPhone’s UK release did much more good.
Why “one company” out of all the people who could be connected to either event?  Simply put: [...]

Two years after dropping its columnists behind a subscription wall, the New York Times tore down the barrier to a valuable source of traffic: search engines.It isn’t as dramatic as the fall of the Berlin Wall years ago, but readers of the Times should be thrilled with the decision to put an end to Times [...]

Search sites measured by comScore under their new qScore 2.0 methodology will benefit from the hosted and affiliated search traffic they send back to the main search engine. It’s a scenario that offers Google a heaping helping of share by comScore’s reckoning.A couple of significant changes by comScore will alter the landscape of how they [...]

Local.com has picked up B2B local directory provider PremierGuide for a about $2 million. PremierGuide offers white-label business directories to local publishers, such as newspapers, radio and TV stations, and regional sites. Its network reportedly includes more than 350 regional media sites, including Community Newspaper Holdings, GateHouse Media, and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.
The business listings are designed [...]

By the raw numbers, comScore’s assessment of June’s search market share showed a 2.9 point rise for Microsoft, while Google, Yahoo, and Ask collectively lost 2.9 points. Yahoo said the reason for this isn’t a zero-sum calculation.To illustrate that point, Yahoo passed along more comScore figures. The May and June 2007 qSearch reports showed the [...]