Rant About It talks about an article that explains where Americans spend most of their time on the Web.

Not surprisingly, MySpace, Yahoo! and eBay top the list.

So why does Google only sit at number five on this list, when Alexa ranks them at number 3? And MySpace is only at number 6 on Alexa’s list?

Well, obviously, one list is talking about the amount of time people spend on a site, the actual traffic that a site gets.

But let’s think about this for a minute — that would mean that we spend less time on Google because we find what we need and move on.

Portal sites (like Yahoo! and MSN) lend themselves to browsing, so people spend more time there (they appeal to a different type of information-seeking behaviour — browsing for something, but you’re not sure what it is or that you want it).

Google’s where we go when we need to find something quickly. Yet we tend to spend more time on Google when we can’t quite find what we’re looking for.

So that begs the question: would a less efficient search engine cause people to spend more time on Google, and therefore keep their eyeballs in front of Google’s ads, thereby making Google more money?