A few days ago AOL released the data (mirror link) for 20 million web queries from 650,000 of its users. This has created some huge privacy issues - for example we now know that user 491577 searched for “florida cna pca lakeland tampa”, “emt school training florida”, “low calorie meals”, “infant seat”, and “fisher price roller blades” and it also showed that others are searching for some pretty disturbing stuff.
A much nicer side to this story is that search engine marketers can now know how much traffic to expect for being first, second or third etc in the search engine results pages.
Ranking 1 receives 42.1% of clicks.
Ranking 2 receives 11.9% of clicks.
Ranking 3 receives 8.5% of clicks.
Ranking 4 receives 6.1% of clicks.
Ranking 5 receives 4.9% of clicks.
Ranking 6 receives 4.1% of clicks.
Ranking 7 receives 3.4% of clicks.
Ranking 8 receives 3.0% of clicks.
Ranking 9 receives 2.8% of clicks.
Ranking 10 receives 3.0% of clicks.
Being the first result is a big difference to being second, but what surprised me is that result 10 is more popular than result 9. Obviously people are getting to the end of the page and clicking the last result instead of going to the second page of search results - if your not in the top 10 you won’t be seeing much traffic at all.