With the upswing in the number of Linux boxes (thank you netbooks and Dell) and as much interest we have in the search engine market, we at Chitika thought we’d take a look at the search habits of our open-source friends. We compared the OS and search engine data for 163,211,927 searches – a sample of the Chitika network’s search data from July 30th through August 16th – and the results were quite interesting.
Sure, Google dominates search across all categories, but what’s surprising is that a whopping 94.61% of all Linux search traffic was from Google, compared with 78.54% of Windows user searches. Compare that with Microsoft’s new “decision engine” Bing, which is holding steady at about 8% of Windows users, but is getting practically no use whatsoever by Linux users – just 0.77% of Linux searches were from Bing. Even Ask.com outdoes Bing for Linux users.
The raw numbers:
| Searches: | Yahoo | Bing | AOL | Ask | Total | |
| Windows | 112,199,369 | 14,813,601 | 11,436,551 | 2,205,492 | 2,210,334 | 142,865,347 |
| Mac | 16,952,430 | 903,707 | 206,384 | 38,073 | 127,905 | 18,228,499 |
| Linux | 1,110,534 | 40,830 | 9,044 | 791 | 12,562 | 1,173,761 |
| Search %: | Yahoo | Bing | AOL | Ask | Total | |
| Windows | 78.54% | 10.37% | 8.01% | 1.54% | 1.55% | 100% |
| Mac | 93.00% | 4.96% | 1.13% | 0.21% | 0.70% | 100% |
| Linux | 94.61% | 3.48% | 0.77% | 0.07% | 1.07% | 100% |