obv, altavista kicks ass. it’s how i found your blog

because if you are searching google for search engines its likely you’re looking for a search engine other than google? not the same for their other products which a lot of people probably don’t know they ofer.

Maybe they reason that since you’re already using THEIR search engine that you must be looking for a DIFFERENT search engine, hence their not including themselves in the results.

I thought about that. Why do they rank google.com #1 for the term “google” then? If people are searching for google, surely they aren’t searching for google.com (ie, the very site they’re searching on). They’re probably searching for information about the company itself.

Try the same search at altavista.com….. Altavista lists itself at #4

Of search terms leading to Google Search, “google” is in the top 10. Its joined by other Google products (video, scholar, images) and people putting in their name.

Also, I took a look at the search terms “search engine” and “search engines.” Across the top 5 engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask) there are 1.23mm searches, with Google sites (includes Google Search, Blogger, etc) getting 11% of click thrus. Dogpile gets 7.6%. The Google engine represents 75% of the searches for these terms. On the Google engine, Google sites get 10.3% of click thrus as Dogpile gets 5.6%. In both cases Blogger’s click thrus are highest, with Dogpile second and Google Search 3rd. Dogpile actually gets the largest share of click thrus from these terms on Y! and Ask.

Not sure if that’s interesting for you, but just thought I’d take a quick look at work.

‘search engine’ is not on the google.com top page.