I offer three pieces of evidence for this: a close reading of a recent Jupiter Media Metrix tally, the logs of a Pressflex client and the logs of another well-known web site.

First, let's look at the Jupiter tally, which show that Google is used by 17% of Internauts and Google.Yahoo.com by 21%.

These numbers ignore the obvious: Google serves power searchers, and everyone else just dabbles. So we need to adjust Jupiter's numbers.

a) First, consider time spent searching. Jupiter found that Google gets used 24 minutes, versus just 6 for MSN. Multiply users by search minutes to get a total search minutes. Presto: with its share of Yahoo, Google serves 52% of total search minutes.

b) Next, adjust for bandwidth. Power searchers tend to be on broadband connections and may do 10 times more searching per minute than the average dialup user. Moreover, the average searcher on dialups also likely gets more searches per minute done on graphic-lite fast-loading Google and Yahoo. So let's multiply Google's search minutes by 2. Now, Google/Yahoo gets 74%.

c) Finally, consider search results quality. We all know that Google returns useable results higher on the page, which means less scrolling and clicking of "next 100 results." So Google/Yahoo's searchers undoubtedly do more searches per minute. Double Google/Yahoo again: 81%.

Why do I feel comfortable arbitrarily massaging the numbers? Because it brings the numbers in line with the referral logs of well constructed web sites.

Here's a summary from the referral log of a magazine site served by my company:

47.4% of referrals come from http://www.google.com/search

15.8% of referrals come from http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query

14.8% of referrals from Google UK, CA, DE, FR, JP, NL, NZ, CH, KR

In sum, Google drives 78% of all this site's referrals.

With just 750 articles, this site got 13,099 referrals from Google/Yahoo in April.

Think this bias to Google grows out of our client's poor showing in other engines? Well, www.aldaily.com's logs show Google generating 54% of referrals and Google's three quarters share of Yahoo serving another 35%.

Webmasters, get out your own logs and compare. Are you proud of getting 1000 referrals from your biggest referrer, MSN or Altavista? In proportion to that, you should be getting another 10-20,000 from Google. If not, you are shooting at the wrong basket. (Think I'm crazy? Vote in the poll in the right column of this page.)

How can the 17%-to-36% crowd be so out of tune? Websidestats, the experts who cranked out the pathetic 36% estimate, derived their tally by analyzing the log stats of the 125,000 sites that Websidestats serves. No doubt some of those sites are well built and get their full daily dose of Google. But, because of slothful webmastering, the average big web site is Google-phobic, hiding pages behind the wrong type of URL and/or failing to welcome spiders. So the total Websidstats pool's average is likely dragged way down.

Compounding the distortion, Websidestory and Jupiter's own sites are themselves Googlephobic. Asking their views on search engines is like asking a deaf person to tune your piano.

I would love to hear about other people's search engine experience. In the meantime, if your site doesn't boogy with Google, redesign NOW.

Henry Copeland at the corner of Lafayette and Prince Street in New York, New York