By: James Hamilton

I have been monitoring the news stories published by the various properties of SYS-CON Media (the publisher of SEO/SEM Journal, to name just one). I have also been following where on the Internet these stories appear, for a case study. Based on the most current 30-day time period, I’ve made some very interesting observations that clearly demonstrate the domination of Google in the Search game, and some of the obvious reasons behind it.

Beyond that, I’ve found some very interesting interesting points involving some legal liabilities and shortcomings of Yahoo! News and MSN News as compared to Google News.

Allow me to illustrate.

In preparation to writing this story, I asked and received some of SYS-CON’s web statistics. For the month of December (through December 28, 2005, 1:05pm EST), SYS-CON delivered roughly 10 million page views (10,155,827 to be exact).

Of this total, 45.7% of the traffic originated from direct links and bookmarks of its readers, and 6.7% of this entire traffic came through links from an Internet Search Engine. When you further split the Internet Search Engine referrals to specific SYS-CON story pages (see the chart below), you see a whopping 89% dominance of Google vs all others–including Yahoo! at 1.9% and MSN at 1.1%! These latter two numbers are rounding errors when compared to Google.

So it is very clear that with a referral rate of less than 7%, search engines are not a major source of readership for large publishers like SYS-CON.

n our case study, when we further dissect this 7% referral rate for Search Engines into three sub-sections–Google News, Yahoo! News and MSN News–the number of page views referred by the news sections of these three Search Engines round up roughly to 0% out of 10 million page views. (Yes, that’s a big goose egg, zero percent!)

Now, let’s look at the big picture in a sub-section of the three major Search Engines, ie, their news sections. This look also illustrates why Google is the hands down “owner” of the Search business. There are some serious fundamental issues behind this big picture.

Here is another illustration from the recent 30-day period, where a story from SYS-CON’s SOA Web Services Journal got picked up by Google News correctly, with the story graphic inserted (above). The same story, this time even marked as “SYS-CON Australia” is credited and linked to one of SYS-CON’s competitors (below). Small wonder again why people read their news on Google News and not Yahoo! News.

Also, did you know that MSN also has a “News” portal, if you can find your way through its web labyrinth and locate it?  We also checked what sort of  job these folks have been doing, with another piece of sample news from our case study.

Here’s an example in which SYS-CON Media announced, on December 12, a conference called “iTVcon - Internet TV Conference & Expo.”

When you search for this announcement news on MSN News, you receive the two above results–a source from India and a casual mention in an unrelated news story.

The same search word “itvcon” on Google News spits out the results you see below. Now again, where would YOU go to get your news? Google News? MSN News? Or Yahoo! News? I think the answer is clear,  and it reflects the respective success and failure of these three players.

And hey, I don’t want to hear from the MSN News people that they almost got it right, but they lost Dr. Kai-Fu Lee to Google at the last minute. You guys can certainly do better than that!

Note: If anyone from MSN News or Yahoo! News reads this story by any chance, I’m telling you that they won’t find it on their own news pages.

Maybe this time that’s a good thing, as long as it does not turn into a big “monopoly discrimination” legal mess. I will report on the follow-up of this story–with illustrations, of course!