Search Engine and Directory Internet Shares.
We prepared this graphic to help illustrate to a client why it is important to manage your site results by search engine. This chart graphically represents the whole story, as far as we are concerned.

Right off the bat, you notice that 41% of all searching done on the internet, something like 394 million searches per period, are done using Yahoo! This answers the question: " Is Yahoo important?"  Furthermore, Google a fine search engine destination itself, accounts for 15% of search use PLUS Yahoo uses the Google database to supplement it's own search results (in the Web Pages category).

Then there is Goto.com, the pay-for-click search engine.  Currently, goto.com has a good business model in that goto.com and its four affiliated search engines report the same results if you are within the top three bids for a search term. Collectively, the goto.com group accounts for over 18% of search engine use.  And then there are MSN and Excite as a stand-alones.

In summary, on Yahoo, Google, goto.com, and MSN,  if a business web site is appearing on the first page of the search results page for critically important search terms, then you are doing an effective job of generating traffic to your site.  While we are sharing this information, it is the execution of the programs to make this happen that is more important. We have this expertise.

And, again, all this is a dynamic and ever-changing situation.