Looking for Rich, Famous and Popular - Search engines, that is!

As part of the research for an upcoming blog post, I've been looking for the top general-purpose search engines that combine innovation, buzz and high levels of traffic. As a starting point, I've taken an initial list and collected information about those engines, in terms of two metrics:

• Traffic - Alexa, Compete and Quantcast data, and
• Buzz - the number of del.icio.us results and number of blog hits in Google BlogSearch in the last month.

The whole thing is then compiled into two normalized ranks, based on the formulae given below. (The list excludes the top-five mainstream search engines: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft LiveSearch, Ask.com and AOL Search.) The results are interesting, to say the least!

[If you represent, or know of, an innovative search engine that has higher levels of traffic and/or buzz than those on this list, and would like it to be included in my upcoming article, please drop me an email at nitink (at) softwareabstractions.com with the subject: Search Innovation.]

Calculation Formulae

The Formulae used for calculating normalized ranks are as follows:

Chart

The Bar Chart of the normalized ranks is shown below - click on the image to view the bigger version :
(Note: The Actual Data Chart used is displayed at the end of this article)

Caveats

Pseudo-science: First of all, note that the diagram above is meant to be an indicator, nothing more (I imagine that the numbers are far from exact, although the overall trends are probably accurate)

Data issues: The grayed-out numbers in the data table below represent anomalies

• Google numbers are provided purely as a reference
• Powerset numbers are simply user visits to the general web site, since their search engine is not actually operational yet
• Actual blog hit numbers for Gigablast and Mahalo are outriders (very high); I suspect that there is some other reason for their use, such as Mahalo in its Hawaiian sense, so I've instead used corresponding data for the terms "Gigablast search" and "Mahalo search"

Observations

• In general, it appears that the older the site, the higher the traffic, regardless of buzz or innovation. This is not as clear from the picture above, but my larger data set also includes traffic numbers for the former portals - Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, and others, and their traffic numbers are high indeed (according to Alexa/QC/C)
• Sites such as Technorati, Topix.com and Del.icio.us, that combine Content+Features+Search have significantly higher numbers than the pure search engines - which is unsurprising
• Numbers from Quantcast and Compete seem to be fairly close in most cases, which is a good sign.
• Interestingly, traffic and buzz ranks are not always correlated, and sometimes diverge quite significantly [hint: see Powerset numbers]

Data Table

The data table used for the above graph is given below  - click on the image to view the bigger version . This is a snapshot of data obtained on 6/20/2007 from the various free web tools/services.

Data Table:

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