Fewer than half of Yahoo!'s paid search clicks come directly from its own search engine, a new study has revealed. In a recent study into search engine marketing revealed the way search engines syndicate their search results and the quality of traffic they generate.

Yahoo! and Google supplement the revenue from their own sites by serving up, or syndicating, their paid results on partner sites across the web.

The company found that Yahoo! generates only 45% of paid clicks from its own searches. The remaining 55% come from its 1,196 partner sites.

By contrast, Google serves 59% of paid searches directly from its search engine, with the remaining 41% coming from its 431 partners.
The findings also suggested that from search engines alone, Google's conversion rate of 75% on paid clicks was better than that of Yahoo! at 58%.

However, the picture is rosier for the Yahoo! partner sites, which performed better on conversion rates than Google's partner network.
Without detailed figures, it is impossible to tell which of the two arch-rival's ad schemes is more effective overall.