Data temporarily released by AOL has revealed some interesting statistics regarding search engine usage.

The dataset contained information on just over 36million search queries, and 19million click-throughs.  The data reinforces the importance of the first position on a search engine results page (SERP), with 42.4% of all click-throughs.

The first 10 positions account for 89.9% of all the click-throughs, which means that if you don’t appear on the first page of the results, you shouldn’t expect large volumes of visitors clicking through to your website, unless the search term is extremely popular.

This knowledge enables website owners to decide what level of investment in Search Engine Optimisation is worthwhile.  An increase in their Search Engine index can be roughly translated into the number of additional visitors this is likely to produce.