With today’s online, always connected public, you’d think that the only direction that search engines would be heading would up, up, up. But it seems that according to a recent report from Shareaholic, the top five search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and AOL, all have seen a decline in search traffic since December of 2013.
Surely this can’t be true, can it? Shareaholic used data that was gathered between December 2013 and May 2014, evaluated aggregate organic traffic numbers from over 300,000 publishers that reaches an audience of more than 400 million monthly unique visitors.
According to the final numbers, Google’s search traffic has fallen 17 percent between December and May of this year.
You think 17% is a big fall? Look at Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and AOL. Their drop was even more devastating. Yahoo and Bing exprienced a 31 percent decline. Ouch.
From the report:
Google searchers are quick to abandon sites they deem unfit to help them solve current issues – on average, 61.26 percent bounce. Also, Google fans, on average, view the fewest number of pages per visit (2.34).
Oddly enough, despite Google’s popularity, the bounce rate is much greater than that of Ask.com, Bing and Yahoo. The latter three have a higher engagement rate when compared to Google.
To check out the Original Source by Amy Gesenhues, go to Search Engine Land