{"id":988,"date":"2008-02-18T21:58:59","date_gmt":"2008-02-18T13:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=988"},"modified":"2014-11-18T11:24:04","modified_gmt":"2014-11-18T03:24:04","slug":"yahoo-and-google-who-has-the-youngest-audience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/computers\/yahoo-and-google-who-has-the-youngest-audience-988","title":{"rendered":"Yahoo and Google - who has the youngest audience?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise wrote last week Yahoo! Search Draws Younger Audience; Google Users Big Spenders Online (page no longer available). She compared the relative percentage of Google and Yahoo searches by age group and obtained the following results.<\/p>\n

Yahoo - Google comparison<\/p>\n

She then concludes that:<\/p>\n

\n

Yahoo! Search attracts a younger audience than Google. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This follows from comparing at the percentages of younger and older searchers between Google and Yahoo. This chart may make it clearer:<\/p>\n

Yahoo - Google<\/p>\n

But wait a minute. This is just comparing age group percentages. What about comparing the actual usage figures, based on total hits, for the different age groups and search engines?<\/p>\n

I looked at the most recent 50,000 search results for my Interactive Mathematics<\/a> site. The percentage of search results coming from Google was 87.5%, while from Yahoo it was only 6.2%.<\/p>\n

This translates to 43737 Google searches compared to 3093 Yahoo searches. (The remaining 6.3% of searches are from Windows Live, MSN and other assorted bit players.)<\/p>\n

Assuming the Hitwise percentages are generally correct, the relative number of search results across different age groups and different search engines is as follows:<\/p>\n

Yahoo - Google comparison<\/p>\n

Actually, I expect that for my site, the percent of searches would be skewed towards the younger age groups for both search engines since it is an educational site.<\/p>\n

It is very clear that young people are choosing to use Google in droves. Yahoo's market share continues to drop and one can hardly conclude, as Hopkins does, that \"Yahoo! Search Draws [a] Younger Audience\".<\/p>\n

There were few analytical comments on Hopkins' post. Over at WebProNews, where Hopkins' article was quoted, there was quite enthusiastic criticism. One person wrote:<\/p>\n

\n

I have never seen such a comparison and such a misleading headline and interpretation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Well, I don't know about that - many of Dubya's headlines and interpretations were pretty misleading, but I agree with the sentiment.<\/p>\n

I will not attempt to comment on which search engine attracts the bigger spenders as I do not have data to compare.<\/p>\n

See the 3 Comments<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A comparison of Google and Yahoo search results refutes the claim that Yahoo draws more younger searchers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[131],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}