Hitwise Reports that Google has 67% of All US Searches. They also say that Yahoo! has 20% and MSN has 7%.

Is it a surprise? not to most of the people I know.

It may be interesting to see where exactly they collected their info. There is no question that information collected from Nebraska will be significantly different that the information collected from California. There are so many tech-oriented users in the Silicon Valley area, and these guys would never use Yahoo! or MSN as their search engine for technical purposes. (Of course, this does not include the employees of Yahoo! and MSN…)

So who are those people that use MSN and Yahoo!?

Most of the users that use MSN are the ones that got their computer with Windows and Internet Explorer and have no idea how to change the default search engine and their browser. In fact, they don’t even know that it is possible. They search, it works, and they are happy. I call this audience ‘the houswifes’.

Yahoo! is a different story. Yahoo! was there first, and there are still people out there that think that Yahoo is the Internet. They open their browser, go to Yahoo.com and then, they type the url they want to browse to, sometimes IN THE SEARCH BOX. Don’t get me wrong, not all Yahoo users are “computerly challenged”, the thing is that Yahoo was there first (almost), and quite a lot of people know how to use it, like the way it works, they like the content, the channels, the email, the news and see no reason to go anywhere else.

What can you learn from it? If you’re running a Pay Per Click campaign or thinking about SEO for a company that sells a Firewall Analyzer, Google is your place and all the rest is a waste of money. IT Managers, Software Engineers, Security Experts are not looking for you in Yahoo!. On the other hand, if your web page is about the Acropolis Audio Tour, You should definitely pay attention to MSN and Yahoo!. Your customers might be there as well.