As Ricky Bobby says…

“If you’re not first, you’re last.

That’s a popular line from Will Ferrell’s current movie (which I saw in San Jose), and the recently released AOL search data proves it to be accurate where search is concerned.

Donna at SEO Scoop discovered a forum post detailing August click-throughs on Top 10 search results by AOL users, and the numbers obviously show that the #1 search result gets 3.5x the clicks that #2 gets. But maybe a better stat to use is this:

No. 1 gets more clicks than Nos. 2 thru 8 combined.

Whoa.

Updated edit: Let me clarify something here. These numbers represent one month of searches on a single search destination; it’s not necessarily representative of the entire search industry. It’s also important to note that this is on AOL, where users are (to be frank) less experienced and less savvy, and more likely to click on the 1st link they see than, say, the more experienced searchers using Google or Yahoo. So I’m not posting this as a statement about search as a whole, only about search on AOL as illustrated by this single example. Got it? Got it.