December 27, 2007

A Look at the Top Searches of 2007

OK, so we all know what people are really searching for most of the time. But if you filter out the perennial favorites (most of which are NSFW), then you can have a look at the most popular, up-and-coming search terms of 2007. In case you missed these earlier, here are the lists of top queries from various search engines:

AOL breaks down its "Hot Searches" by categories, including movies, bands, and accidental celebrities

Ask.com shows that its search volume can predict World Series winners...now will the Cowboys beat the Patriots and prove that true for the NFL as well? If Ask users are unusually prescience extends to presidential candidates, it looks like Barack Obama has Hillary Clinton beat.

Google brings us its year-end zeitgeist, telling us that the iPhone, Webkinz, TMZ and Transformers were the fastest-rising search terms of the year in the U.S.

Lycos tells us that poker, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton topped the search charts this year.

Yahoo's Top Trends in Search in 2007 reveal that Saddam Hussein, Britney Spears, and Harry Potter were among the most searched-for names this year.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:19 AM | Permalink

December 18, 2006

Keyword Research Best Practices

Barry pointed out a great response to thread at Search Engine Watch forums by Paid Search Guru Ian McAnerin. A member had asked Forum visitors which industries they "would not touch with a 10 foot SEO pole?"

Ian answers led to some additional excellent discussion at SEW and a couple of gems in the SER comments.

Keyword research is a topic that is considered to be very basic by many in the SEO and Paid Search fields. This is likely due to the fact that it has been one of the few constants since the early days of SEO, when tools began to appear that were geared towards finding the right keywords. Since, many writing about the subject have indicated the same core needs: relevancy and popularity, including Danny from way back when, Kevin Lee, Shari Thurow, and most recently Christine Churchill.

Ian's post at Search Engine Watch makes three main points: First that some industries may be too difficult to venture into without specialized experience; secondly, you may not want to venture into some industries due to business concerns (he cites Realtors as being especially “difficult” when it comes to payment or buying in to the value); and lastly that your personal belief set may be in conflict with the particular industry, such as Hate or Porn sites, for example.

Ian comment raised some good follow up questions, and he defends his opinion that one should “cut their teeth” by targeting more localized terms. The whole topic leads well to a discussion of the core competency of keyword research. When venturing into a new space, it is likely that many SEO's are at a slight disadvantage due to being unfamiliar with terms. When deciding on whether to accept a project, it actually takes a fair amount of diligence on the part of any SEO; otherwise they may be simply saying “sure we'll get you ranked.” This could be an alarm signal.

Using geo-modified keywords as the target can also prove to be difficult if not properly done. In some cases, there may be a majority of searchers using the city or town before the more general term (i.e.: Timbuktu hotel) while in others, people may use it more often after the term. The fact is that without excellent and trusted keyword research, only trial and error will lead to the required log files that report the actual activity. This trial and error period can be greatly eased by having an unlimited paid search budget to run all keywords on broad match across all engines for at least 2 or three months. Unfortunately not everyone has the budget to do that. However, running these types of campaigns on a local basis may be somewhat helpful.

One comment that was very insightful at the SER blog was that “generally the most competitive websites have the highest cost in PPC advertising. Find the biggest spenders and you have the stiffest competition.” Although this is a generalization, it holds fairly true. When making a decision as to whether to venture into an industry for SEO, a quick check of the results pages for Paid Search listings can save a good amount of time for small SEO/SEM shops.

Posted by Chris Boggs at 9:09 AM | Permalink

December 10, 2006

November Search Trend Data Released by Compete.com

Compete.com, a new search popularity tool bar and measurement service, similar to Alexa, released their data for November 2006, indicating a bounce back in traffic for Google after a small slide, and a decrease for Yahoo, who had experienced a bit of growth during October.

Interesting to note is Ask.com's growth over last year's traffic numbers, perhaps as a result of offline advertising to support the rebranding efforts.

Other key data released by Compete.com for November included top search term traffic for proper names, which contained the usual suspects of celebrity names & gossip fodder. Read more about how Compete gathers search popularity data in the corresponding blog post.

Greg Sterling first covered the launch of Compete.com, and other search gurus such as John Battelle are looking for the service to provide better data than Alexa.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 2:36 PM | Permalink

November 29, 2006

Alexa Ain't So Bad, Says Site Search Comparison

Alexa has come under plenty of fire recently as not being accurate (old hands have known better for years), as more and more people are using it to "prove" how hot their sites are. Sean Ryan at SLI Systems says lay off the Alexa bashing! SLI provides search services for a variety of web sites. Sean plotted the amount of searches he sees against the relative Alexa traffic rankings of some sites and found there was a correspondence. If you were a high traffic Alexa site, you also had a lot of site searches. Interesting, but I'm afraid it won't make a believer out of me.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:06 AM | Permalink

November 22, 2006

Search Popularity Stats, Sliced & Diced

Catch up time on search engine popularity stats. comScore and NetRatings put out October 2006 figures this week, plus Hitwise released those earlier this month. Google's still tops, Yahoo still strong, Microsoft is still dropping and Ask surpasses AOL's search share, according to comScore. Below, the trend from all of them over the past year, plus my long-promised compare-and-contrast charts.

First, let's do a compare-and-contrast table with the basic figures from each service. These show the estimated share of the number of searches that happened in the United States in October 2006.

Month

comScore

NetRatings

Hitwise

Google

45.4%

49.6%

60.9%

Yahoo

28.2%

23.9%

22.3%

Microsoft

11.7%

8.8%

10.6%

Ask

5.8%

2.8%

4.3%

AOL

5.4%

6.2%

0.5%

Others

3.5%

8.7%

1.2%

Across the board, all the services put Google in the lead, Yahoo second and Microsoft's Windows Live third (sorry, I still say MSN on the chart). Two of the services put Ask over AOL in the fourth place spot. More analysis on all this in the service trend charts, below.

Here's comScore figures over the past year:

Remember that Google drop back in July, when lots of people started freaking out about the demise of the Big G. I warned not to focus on month-to-month changes. Since then, Google's recovered according to comScore and keeps going.

Yahoo's seen declines since July, but not enough to send up the alarm bells. They are well within the usual ranges that I've discussed are the things to watch. That range is the 25 to 30 percent slice of the chart.

In contrast, Microsoft continues on its long, steady drop in popularity. It will especially be interesting to see the figures in the next few months, as IE7 rolls out and potentially gives Microsoft Live Search a bump. Or not. My Searching Via Internet Explorer 7 & The Battle To Be The Default Search Engine article talks more about the changes in IE7 that might help drive traffic.

Unnoticed, as far as I can tell, is the fact that in September, Ask overtook AOL for the fourth slot in the search engine share battle. That's a big deal. In fact, according to comScore, AOL is on track to plunge out of the 5 to 10 percent band it has occupied over the past year. Ask is hanging in there.

Of course, the traffic for Ask isn't just for Ask.com. It's for the combination of sites that Ask owns or controls, including places like Excite, iWon, MyWay.com and My Web Search. Still, as a network, Ask remains controlling a significant chunk of the search space.

That's what comScore says. Now let's see how it looks at NetRatings:

Basically, NetRatings shows status quo. Google and Yahoo keep ticking along at the same levels. So does Ask. AOL hangs in roughly the same general range. It's Microsoft Windows Live (MSN on the chart) that catches my eye most with consistent decline.

Also note that with NetRatings, AOL is well above Ask. That's because NetRatings is only reporting the share for Ask.com. If other Ask-owned properties were combined, then the Ask figure would be higher. Much of that traffic instead flows into the "Other" line.

Next to Hitwise:

Hitwise doesn't go back as far as NetRatings and comScore, so it's harder to feel confident about trends. But the trends are similar to comScore, a slight Google rise, Yahoo holding steady, Ask above AOL and that decline of MSN.

Now back to what I promised ages ago, the old-style comparison charts I used to do. Here are all three services together, showing share score for October 2006:

Now let me explain what I think is unique in charting the figures this way. Usually, you'd see a comparison using a bar chart. Shares for Google from all three services would be shown as three bars next to each other, then the same for Yahoo and so on.

I like doing these as line charts, because it makes the gaps more noticeable and gives you a trend as well.

For example, you can see how all the services rate Google tops, though the amount Google is above the others may vary. Conclusion? While Google's exact popularity is uncertain, it's clearly more popular than anyone else, the services agree.

Notice that with Yahoo, they all agree it is in second place and the general range of popularity is closer (roughly between 25 to 30 percent). For MSN (Windows Live), the all come together. When you hit AOL, Hitwise is the big player that's way off the mark from the other two. I've covered this before, that I don't think Hitwise is getting accurate information about AOL that causes this. But seeing the two big skews -- that Hitwise puts Google so high above the others and AOL so low -- makes me think that if AOL was counted correctly, then Hitwise would be reflecting the same general trend as the others.

Now let's trend each of the major search engines using figures from all three services. Here's Google:

Fair to say, Google's pretty much continuing to grow, despite the hiccups you might see from time-to-time on various services.

Here's Yahoo:

Generally, I think it's fair to say that Yahoo had a spike in popularity earlier this year but has settled down more to its usual levels. That's not bad. It has healthy, long-term traffic. What remains to be seen is if it can grow that traffic more in the long term.

Here's Microsoft:

Slice it how you want, no one is reporting a pretty picture for Microsoft. Unlike Yahoo, they haven't held share. It's drop, drop, drop.

Here's AOL, which similar to Microsoft, shows drops:

I'm sorry I don't have the similar chart for Ask. I'll try to add it later, but I shut my spreadsheet (argh) before saving my comparison numbers, so I have some more copy and pasting to do to get that chart back.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:19 AM | Permalink

November 21, 2006

Google Beats Microsoft, Yahoo As College Grad Choice

Online Recruitment reports on a CollegeGrad.com poll showing Google is the most desired place for technology students to work for. The poll asked 1,600 respondents in October "Who would you rather work for?" The results:

• Google - 49%
• Microsoft - 29%
• Yahoo - 12%
• IBM - 10%

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:30 AM | Permalink

October 31, 2006

SnapShot: A Better Version Of Alexa

Compete, Inc. is a B2B firm that conducts consumer-oriented research for large clients. Now the company has released SnapShot, a free tool that anyone can use. It operates like Alexa or Google Trends to display relative traffic, as well as several other metrics such as page views and time on site. Here's an example.

According to Compete, there's a qualitative and quantitative difference between this tool and Google Trends or Alexa, because it leverages their entire 2 million person panel. See Compete's Alexa comparison.

There are a few limitations: it's U.S. audience only, sites with fewer than 10,000 monthly uniques are excluded and you can only compare three sites side by side. But out of the gate it's a much better and more accurate tool than Alexa.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 12:14 PM | Permalink

October 24, 2006

Google Gains Traction In Japan

InfoWorld reports that Google has "17.4 million users in September, up from 12.1 million in the same period a year earlier." This gives Google the 10th spot in the Japan's web property ranking. Google the 10th spot in the Japan's web property ranking. The NetRatings study shows Yahoo Japan holding 23.6 million visits during the month. Google has the 3rd most page views of the top 10, with 2 billion page views for the month.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:26 AM | Permalink

October 18, 2006

Why Don't External Site Popularity Estimates Add Up?

A twofer today on whether you can trust the web metrics that are reported out there, one an article from BusinessWeek while the other is a big study from SEOmoz based on data gathered from a variety of search blogs. More details below, with lots of comments from me along the way.

Web Numbers: What's Real? from BusinessWeek looks at how sites want to prove they're popular but their own internal metrics might not stand-up to external ones -- nor do external services themselves agree.

I love the irony here. I wrote about how in August, BusinessWeek itself declared Digg to be the 24th most popular site in the US based on Alexa data that many marketers are highly suspicious of. Now I've got BusinessWeek telling me:

The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley is that no one knows exactly who is going where on the Web.

Pity that secret wasn't outed before a BusinessWeek cover story leveraging on of those stats so highly. In fact, BusinessWeek now writes:

Web outfits seem to agree that Alexa is flawed, but they continue to rely on it because the data are so addictive. Since Alexa's numbers are free and available online, they can easily be plugged into a PowerPoint presentation or onto a blog, providing a quick-and-dirty way to get a competitive snapshot. Blogs cite Alexa as gospel, and its graphs are part of nearly every startup's pitch to investors.

Apparently, the stats were just gospel for bloggers. BusinessWeek took it as gospel itself.

Meanwhile, the story leaves me cold when it says:

No wonder that a host of newer services, such as Alexa and Hitwise, are highlighting the weaknesses of the older traffic-measuring companies and are muscling onto the scene with alternatives.

Yes, Alexa's only been offering site traffic estimates since at least 1999, so let's call it a newer service. Sorry for the rant, BusinessWeek, but you're not redeeming yourself well with this.

Still, it's a nice update to what's actually an old, old problem, that internal metrics might not agree with external estimates. The search engines long ago would yap that comScore or NetRatings said they weren't as popular as internally they believed. Naturally, they stay quiet if those figures perhaps are off in their favor. My past series on stats look at this more:

• comScore Figures Show First Google Decline For Nearly A Year, But What To Believe?
• NetRatings: Tiny Google Decline, But Not The First Time & Yahoo Growth
• Hitwise: Google & Yahoo Make Tiny Gains In July 2006

Another good point in the article is how it highlights that things like AJAX and widgets might not get counted in traffic figures. Counting popularity on the web has never been easy, and it's just getting more complicated.

Meanwhile, over at SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin's finished a project where he's assembled internal metrics from various search-related blogs and compares them to some external metrics. Website Analytics vs. Competitive Intelligence Metrics is well worth checking out, if only to see how different sites stack up against each other, based on self-reported figures.

Unfortunately, the big visitor table isn't sorted by any particular order. It's mainly showing sites with the most visits in 2006, but there are a few glitches that throw it off. Still, lots of stats to love there.

There's another table that lists metrics from Alexa, Compete, Technorati and other sources for each of the sites. This is even harder to digest. The table seems sorted in order of who was popular based on the internal metrics. It would have been better to sort it by one of the external metrics (say Alexa) and then let you see the rank order compared to the internal metrics.

Lots of slack to Rand, however -- he had his hands full just getting this assembled and still needs time to get his Digg submission crew going to gain some page views for it. Look, Rand's blog gets most of its traffic from Digg -- he's a master. Yep, but hey Rand -- who has the highest percentage of traffic from search engines? That would be my Daggle blog -- eat my dust, Rand! Then again, that might also suggest an lack of other online marketing activities for Daggle -- and that would be right. It's just my play area :)

Back to the internal versus external comparison. With the tables hard to digest, I went straight to the summary:

From our estimates, the top 5 best predictors of traffic, in order, are:

1. Technorati Rank
2. Yahoo! Link Count
3. Technorati Link Count
4. SEOmoz's Page Strength Score
5. Alexa Rank

However, none of these are nearly accurate enough to use, even in combination, to help predict a site's level of traffic or its relative popularity, even in a small niche with similar competitors. Unfortunately, it appears that the external metrics available for competitive intelligence on the web today simply do not provide a significant source of value....

Incidentally, I did log in to Hitwise to check their estimations and although I can't publish them (as Hitwise is a paid service and doing so would violate terms of service), I can say that the numbers issued from the competitive intelligence tool were no better than Alexa's in predicting relative popularity or traffic estimation.

The sad conclusion is that right now, no publicly available competitive analysis tool we're aware of provides solid value. Let's hope the next few years provide better data. Please leave comments, questions or feedback in this blog post on the topic.

Go get your Digg traffic for this, Rand -- it's well deserved.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:16 AM | Permalink

October 6, 2006

Hitwise: 'Social Local Search' Growing Fast

Hitwise's LeeAnn Prescott, who presented at SES Local, has posted some of the data she showed at the conference. In this particular example, what she compared was traffic to traditional yellow pages sites vs. directory sites that incorporated user-generated content:

"[G]rowth over the past year to the yellow pages custom category has been relatively flat, while the market share of visits to the custom category containing Yahoo! Local, Yelp, Judy's Book and Insider Pages has grown by 44% when comparing August 2005 to August 2006. While standard yellow pages sites are receiving significantly more traffic in terms of volume, these newer directory services, with maps, reviews, and community features are quickly catching up."

Posted by Greg Sterling at 10:59 AM | Permalink

October 5, 2006

Search Competition; Why Can't Others Catch Up To Google?

BusinessWeek.com has a good article on search competition, explaining how Google's continued growth amongst all the competition is practically unaffected. In short, the article goes over new features, refinements, and user interfaces and explains that it is mostly about the trust the searchers have for the Google brand to provide the best results. Take a look at Danny's recent rant, he goes into this more and also check out Danny's post on Daggle.com named Why Search Sucks & You Won't Fix It The Way You Think. Want a view from a Google employee on the article, read Matt Cutts take on it, where he kinda of knocks Ask.com's topic communities link analysis method, saying it is "hard to explain" to people.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:20 AM | Permalink

September 18, 2006

Baidu Holds 62% Share In China

LinuxWorld reports that Baidu, the Chinese search engine, has 62.1 percent share based on a China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) report. That is up 10 points from 52 percent in 2005. In terms of brand recognition in China, 86.5 percent identifying with the name "Baidu," where only 64 percent identifying with the name "Google" in China. The study does state that 76.3 percent use more than one search engine regularly. The article everyone is buzzing about is a NY Times article named The Rise of Baidu (That's Chinese for Google), it really does make for a good read.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:53 AM | Permalink

September 13, 2006

Hitwise Data Center Offers Search Terms & Top Search Engines For Various Countries

New from Hitwise is the Hitwise Data Center, sharing details on web surfing behavior. There are different data centers for various countries, and for search marketers, two key reports tell you top terms and top search engines.

Hitwise Data Center US, for example, shows you the top search engines by volume of searches here and top search terms here. From the Data Center home page, you can also use the drop-down box to get top terms by particular categories, such as these for dating.

Beyond the US, there's also:

• Hitwise Data Center UK
• Hitwise Data Center Australia
• Hitwise Data Center New Zealand
• Hitwise Data Center Singapore
• Hitwise Data Center Hong Kong

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:49 PM | Permalink

September 6, 2006

Classifieds A Big Gainer In Local Landscape

comScore is reporting that the classifieds category is gaining very fast with 47% annual traffic growth. Classifieds sites, as defined by comScore, collectively racked up 37.4 million monthly uniques in July. That's 22% penetration of the total U.S. online population. As one might predict the category leader is Craigslist, which had 13.8 million users and experienced 99% growth vs. the previous year. Only two sites grew faster than Craigslist on a percentage basis: LiveDeal (104%) and Oodle (463%).

Posted by Greg Sterling at 4:38 AM | Permalink

August 31, 2006

Flickr #1 Photography Site In UK

Hitwise is reporting that Flickr is the #1 photography site in the UK. This isn't really a surprise at all - what's more suprising is that it's taken a while to get there, and how it's got there.

Flickr's UK market share has increased 39%, Photobucket's share decreased by 17% and Webshot's remained flat. This is apparently due good SEO and searches for soft porn using the brand name and various terms you can work out for yourself.

In some respects this is worthy of nothing more than a wry smile and shrug of the shoulders. Unfortunately however, this may be seen in some circles as a justification for the calls for libraries to limit their (innocent) involvement with Flickr.

As reported by Michael Stephens in ALA TechSource back in July various emails have been flying around making rather silly claims. While these emails seem to have been centered on American libraries it will be interesting to see if the same thing happens in the UK. I rather doubt that it will, but it's worth watching out for. So, a slightly double edged sword for Flickr in Britain.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 12:43 PM | Permalink

August 23, 2006

Hitwise: Google & Yahoo Make Tiny Gains In July 2006

Today I look at figures from Hitwise, as part of my series on search engine rating figures that have recently been released and how to analyze them. For those just tuning in, on Monday, I covered comScore stats showing a Google decline in July 2006. On Tuesday, I talked about NetRatings also showing a decline, but a smaller one than comScore. The main point in both of those articles was to stress the need to look at data over a longer period of time than month-to-month and to examine figures from multiple services.

Unlike comScore and NetRatings, Hitwise has only been publicly releasing "share of search" figures since March 2006. Share of search means that you look at all the searches that happen on the web, in a particular country, within a particular vertical space or whatever. Then you calculate what percentage of those shares each search engine handles.

Having share of search figures is a real relief compared to the bad old days of counting unique visitors or visits or page views from across an entire site. This past article explains more about that.

Now Hitwise is doing what comScore and NetRatings have been doing. However, where the underlying data comes from is different. The other companies watch what surfers are doing by having a group that they monitor through meters, systems on your computer to seeing where you go and what you do. Hitwise instead analyzes data from ISPs that it partners with. It sees what groups of people are doing through the ISP data it obtains.

While the exact data gathering method varies, the idea is generally the same. All three companies are monitoring groups of real surfers, to make estimates about what the entire audience of web surfers are doing.

What's Hitwise got to say about search activity last month? Here's the share of searches in the United States that each search engine is estimated to have handled:

Search Engine Domain

6/06

7/06

Change

Google www.google.com

59.8%

60.2%

0.5%

Yahoo search.yahoo.com

22.3%

22.5%

0.3%

MSN search.msn.com

12.1%

11.8%

-0.3%

Ask www.ask.com

3.6%

3.3%

-0.3%

AOL search.aol.com

1.05%

1.01%

-0.04%

For The 4 Week Period Ending:

7/1/06

7/29/06

My freshly updated page, Hitwise Search Engine Ratings, gives you stats going further back in time, along with more explanations about what the domains might or might not include. There may be plenty of searches that aren't being counted, something I'm checking with Hitwise about.

I've warned not to worry about month-to-month changes, yet I've shown them in the chart above in order to talk more about reasons why you might not fret so much. As I've covered, two ratings services have said Google dropped in July in differing amounts. Now here's a third saying it grew. Decision? You might split the difference and assume the truth is somewhere in between. It might not be comScore's one point plunge. It might not be Hitwise's half-point rise. It might be closer this time to what NetRatings was showing, a very slight decline or perhaps no gain.

Let's pull the trend chart from my Hitwise page, then we'll talk month-to-month stuff more:

In my article yesterday, I talked about being worried mainly if I saw a particular search engine plunge through particular "bands" on a chart, say if MSN were to break out of the 10 to 15 percent band. From the Hitwise chart, things are pretty much status quo across the board.

Look at Yahoo back in May. It hit 22.0 percent, a decline from 22.2 percent in April 2006 and 22.3 percent the month before in March. Conclusion? Ring the alarm bells! But then it climbed the next two months. Now it's at the highest point in five months. But if you consider the entire period, it pretty much hasn't changed. Anyone looking at only month-to-month comparisons is probably ringing alarm bells needlessly or lighting cigars with $100 bills that they ought to be banking.

Google was looking to be a band buster, of course. It popped into the 60 to 65 percent range. Party time at the Plex? Early data I mentioned yesterday from Hitwise suggests that August 2006 will see Google back in the 55 to 60 percent band. If so, that's again more a status quo event than a trend to me, unless you're happy with status quo being a trend, and I am.

MSN's generally seeing drops from Hitwise, something the other services are also reflecting. On the back of all three of them, this is a case where the alarm bells feel far more warranted. It's mostly within its regular band, but it does seem likely it's going to plunge into a new, lower level.

It's also interesting that AOL is a far, far lower share than the other services. Hitwise gives it a 1 percent share for July 2006. NetRatings gives it a 11.8 percent share, while comScore a 5.9 percent share.

The most likely reason that Hitwise is so low is that it cannot see the searches that AOL users are doing, if they access AOL Search from within AOL, using AOLs own software and access lines. That's going to have an impact. As a result, it's difficult to trust the Hitwise figures much in the case of AOL -- though in my next part, I'll still explain how to tap into the rating services to measure a search engine's health, even if they all seem to disagree.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:50 AM | Permalink

August 22, 2006

NetRatings: Tiny Google Decline, But Not The First Time & Yahoo Growth

Yesterday I looked at the latest figures out of comScore that showed Google seeing its first drop in search share for nearly a year. My review of rating service figures continues today with NetRatings. They also show a Google drop, but far less than the comScore figures.

We'll get to the NetRatings figures in a moment, but first a look back at comScore. I said I had some follow-up questions for them. comScore kindly responded, and you'll find answers postscripted here.

I poked a bit at comScore for spinning its figures in press releases to gain attention. But exactly as Frank Barnako notes, all the ratings services do it. Heck, newspapers do it, and we do it ourselves on occasion, look for an angle that will attract attention to a story.

The main thing I'm trying to encourage with any of the figures you review -- or really anything you read -- is to use that old "critical thinking" stuff that my high school teachers used to pound into my head. Question everything and wonder about what's not being said or examined. Amr Awadallah gives an example of this from earlier in the year.

As another example, we have the situation now, where Google saw a July 2006 decline in marketshare as reported by comScore. Beginning of the end, or perhaps something you'd expect? As I noted, month-to-month or month-to-year-ago figures might not be enough to tell the story. As it turns out from the long-term comScore chart I showed earlier, Google's had declines before. That's not in the press release that went out, but comScore did highlight it in the follow-up they sent me:

We agree with your assessment that a single-month decline does not constitute a trend. In fact, comScore also observed a similar seasonal decline for Google during the same period last year. Fewer work days, more vacations, and reliance on academia could all contribute to Google's core user group showing lower online activity and conducting fewer searches during this time period. Bottom line – Google could be more impacted by seasonality than other engines

Now let's head into NetRatings. I was going to do Hitwise today, but ever so coincidentally, NetRatings put out its latest search share figures a few hours after comScore released theirs. Funny how that happens, eh?

The release isn't online yet, but you can watch for it via the NetRatings press page here. There was no particular spin to it, just a simple headline of:

Nielsen//NetRatings Announces July U.S. Search Share Rankings

FYI, NetRatings didn't play down an angle in the wake of my comScore article. Go through the archives, and you'll see that this is how releases of search share have been put out by NetRatings since May, all low key. Of course, go back a bit further and then you get into releases that also pitch angles.

How about those figures? Here they are, all searches within the United States:

July 2006

Share

Searches (Millions)

Searches Per Day (Millions)

Google

49.2%

2,776

92.5

Yahoo

23.8%

1,346

44.9

MSN

9.6%

542

18.1

AOL

6.3%

355

11.8

Ask

2.6%

149

5.0

My Way

2.3%

129

4.3

EarthLink

0.6%

32

1.1

iWon

0.6%

31

1.0

Netscape

0.5%

29

1.0

Dogpile

0.4%

24

0.8

Others

4.1%

233

7.8

Total

100.0%

5,646

188.2

Now let's look at some trends. Pulling the chart from my now updated Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings page, we get this

You can see the tiniest of drops for Google from June to July. For Yahoo, a marked rise. MSN continues that slow, slow drop. Now for some drill downs.

One of the key things I said yesterday about dealing with search share figures is to watch patterns over a long period of time and also look at what's happening with different services. If you only watched comScore, Google had nearly a year of rises until July's fall. Seeing a drop and only knowing about comScore figures might be alarming.

In contrast, the chart above shows that Google's gone through several declines more recently, at least according to NetRatings. In April 2006, it had a peak of 49.8 percent of the search share in the US. The next month in May it dropped nearly a full point to 49.1 percent. The following month in June, a slight rise to 49.4 percent. Then in July, a slight drop to 49.2 percent.

Go back further to May 2005. Starting that month at 48.0 percent, Google drops each month through September 2005 to 45.1 percent, nearly three full points! Alarm bell time!

Perhaps at the time, some might have felt that way. But then you see the traffic come back up. As comScore noted, it might be that Google gets hit more by seasonal swings. If they have a heavier than normal school and university audience, perhaps that group is searching less during the summertime in the Northern Hemisphere.

When I'm looking at the figures, I'm watching to see if the line moves through important bands. Again, see the NetRatings chart above. Every fifth percent mark has a solid line. I'm less worried if Google goes up or down between the 45 and 50 percent marks. I'm more interested if it breaks out of that band in either direction for a long period of time.

That's one reason why when comScore figures were ringing some alarms with some analysts earlier this year, I felt pretty mellow about Yahoo. In the comScore stats, it was staying within the 25 to 30 percent band it had been in for several months. Moreover, the NetRatings figures had Yahoo pretty solid in the 20 to 25 percent range.

In contrast, it's really hard to be positive about MSN. comScore showed it marching out of the 15 to 20 percent range back in October and into the 10 to 15 percent band. OK, Yahoo stepped out of the 30 to 35 percent range around the same time. But NetRatings also showed MSN doing a long dead-man-walking decline, unlike the case with Yahoo. The latest NetRating figures have just taken it into the 5 to 10 percent range, from the 10 to 15 percent range it previously was in. Even more alarming is the fact that this decline all comes after significant spending MSN has done to try and build its search brand. That spending clearly hasn't helped.

I'll be watching over the next several months to see if the MSN decline reverses. Of course, domain "roll-ups" might be a factor.

Every service "rolls-up" a number of domains to create traffic figures. For example, the "Ask" figures from comScore will include Ask.com plus some Ask-powered web sites. NetRatings, in contrast, will count Ask.com traffic separately than traffic to Ask-powered sites such as iWon.

The MSN figures might not be counting some of the Windows Live traffic that Microsoft is generating. Windows Live is the new leading brand, and more and more traffic is being pushed there. I'm checking with NetRatings about this.

As a side note, I wish all the ratings services spelled-out exactly all the domains that are used to measure the traffic to respective services. It would make it much easier to know if they are neglecting anything important.

How about the other major players on the chart? You'll see AOL has a big spike in August 2005. I'm not sure what happened there, but it was probably a change to counting methodology. I'm checking with NetRatings on this. But that type of spike is another reason that taking two particular months and comparing them out of context with surrounding months can be dangerous.

Finally, there's Ask.com, which keeps plugging away. The key thing to keep in mind here, as I noted already, is that NetRatings measures for Ask.com while comScore measures for the entire Ask network.

Tomorrow, I'll look at some Hitwise figures. Hitwise was actually the first out this month with ratings from July. If you're itching to see them, jump on over here. Unlike comScore and NetRatings, they show Google making a gain from June 2006 to July 2006. Like the other two services, they do agree on a Yahoo gain between those months. Bill Tancer over there has also just done a weekly breakdown going into August that shows slight Yahoo and MSN gains and slight Google losses.

Also, just a last note of encouragement to all the rating services. I like them. I know they have problem and that the stats aren't perfect. But they give us all a starting place. The purpose of this series isn't to knock the services but rather help educate those who look at this figures on how to better assess them.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:21 AM | Permalink

August 21, 2006

comScore Figures Show First Google Decline For Nearly A Year, But What To Believe?

The latest search engine share figures from comScore are now out, and Google's nearly year-long continued rises have came to a halt in July 2006, according to comScore. But how much can you trust any of the figures that ratings services provide? In this post, I look at the latest comScore stats and begin a series about how to critically evaluate search share ratings.

I've been dealing with search ratings for 10 years now. I've seen all types of things in that time. I've watched as ratings services would suddenly pull their publicly reported information, only to resume it when a competitor came along. I've watched things like AltaVista get classified as a portal rather than a search engine or important subdomains of a particular search engine not get counted. I've been bemused at how a search engine will heartily endorse figures from a ratings service when they are positive then tell investors not to trust the figures when they go against them.

My best overall advice to anyone looking at these figures is:

• Look for long-term trends. You want to view stats for several months in a row, not two isolated months compared to each other. Stats can and will plunge from one month to the next for all types of reasons, not the least due to a ratings service itself having some counting glitch. Similarly, comparing back from one month to the same time the previous year might not reflect counting changes that may have happened or been refined over that time. I want a trend line -- and a long one.  
• Look at figures from multiple services. For several months, comScore has painted a pretty bleak figure for Yahoo, showing share decreases. At least twice this year (January & July), Yahoo has had to warn analysts not to trust the comScore figures too much (and oh the irony of Yahoo now having hired the former comScore CEO this month). In contrast, NetRatings was showing Yahoo as pretty stable. If I'm going to declare Yahoo in trouble (and I didn't), I'm more likely to do that if more than one ratings service is reflecting a plunge of some time. If it's only one of them, then I'm more in "watch and see" mode.

Now let's jump into today's figures out of comScore, which are for share of all searches within the United States:

July 2006

Share

Searches (Millions)

Searches Per Day (Millions)

Google

43.7%

2,753

91.8

Yahoo

28.8%

1,814

60.5

MSN

12.8%

806

26.9

AOL

5.9%

372

12.4

Ask

5.4%

340

11.3

Others

3.4%

214

7.1

NOTE: My figures for searches will vary slightly from comScore's as I'm working off the overall rounded 6.3 billion searches figure they provide multiplied by share percentages. I have to do that to calculate the share of "others" searches, which comScore does not provide. The comScore press release has precise figures.

Google's still shown as well above the rest. But the press release headline from comScore highlights a Yahoo victory:

Yahoo! Sites Register a Moderate Share Gain for the Second Consecutive Month

Indeed, some good news for Yahoo out of comScore for once. They have a gain that seems to come off of Google's loss.

Let's look at a big trend chart, then we'll do a drill down. Pulling the chart from my now updated comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings page, we get this:

Who Gained & Lost In June & July

You can see how comScore's shown Yahoo having slight drops, then a bigger drop in January, then rises in June and July. In particular, if you go back to May 2006, Yahoo had a 28 percent share. In June, it rose to 28.5 percent. In July, a further rise to 28.8 percent.

What's fueling that gain? Maybe Yahoo Answers being popular and getting heavy promotion? Maybe something else? The answer is, we don't really know. But we can try to see who is losing.

Is Google the loser? Not in June. When Yahoo saw a gain in June, so did Google. Google went up from 44.2 percent in May to 44.7 percent. in June In contrast, MSN dropped from 13.1 percent to 12.8 percent and Ask dropped from 5.3 percent to 5.1 percent. Those drops fueled some of the gains for both Yahoo and Google.

AOL is the mystery player. comScore gave no figure for May 2006. Actually, it did -- 6.7 percent. But the following month, it clawed back that figure, saying:

Due to a definitional change occurring with June 2006 data, trended data for the Time-Warner Network are not available

Since we don't have a May 2006 figure, we can't tell if the June 2006 figure for AOL -- 5.6 percent -- was a gain from or loss to Google and Yahoo.

I've been through this type of thing before. Usually, it means that methodology has changed so much that the ratings service doesn't feel comfortable comparing figures under a new system to the old one. This note is unusual in that it's particular to AOL, rather than the methodology over all. It's also disturbing, because it suggests that all those months of AOL figures previously reported perhaps can't be trusted.

I'm asking comScore about this and will update. But let's move ahead to July. Again, the goal is to figure out who lost to Yahoo's gain. In July, it really was Google, mostly. Google dropped a full percentage point, 44.7 percent in June to 43.7 percent in July. Yahoo got some of that, a 0.3 percent rise to 28.8 percent. AOL got a 0.3 percent rise as well, coming up to 5.9 percent. The Ask network of sites also came up 0.3 percent, to 5.4 percent. MSN didn't budge.

Crisis for Google? Way, way too early to be saying stuff like that. As I said, I want to see several months of trending data from a particular player before I start issuing panic calls. For all I know, next month comScore will quietly reissue these figures that shows Google doing better.

Revising Data After The Fact

For instance, let's go back to May 2006. Did you know that a month after comScore released figures, they revised those? There was no big press release about it. It was an asterisk mention as part of the June 2006 figures.

What was different? Let's compare:

Company

Original

Revised

Difference

Google

44.1%

44.2%

0.1%

Yahoo

27.9%

28.0%

0.1%

MSN

12.9%

13.1%

0.2%

AOL

6.7%

n/a

???

Ask

5.3%

5.3%

0.0%

MySpace

0.7%

n/a

???

Others

2.4%

9.4%

7.0%

Aside from AOL, there was no really big change among the players. But then again, this revision suddenly changed MSN from a fifth month in a row of either decreases or no gain to the different story of the first gain in five months.

MySpace The Search Monster?

Also notice how MySpace disappears off the chart, in the revised figures. What happened? Why did comScore stop reporting figures there? I'm checking on that as well, but my guess is that close attention to the MySpace figures may have backfired on comScore.

Let's go back to April 2006. That's the first time that out of the blue, we get search figures for MySpace. comScore told us:

MySpace.com has been added to the search engine rankings for April 2006, coming in at 6th place with 43 million search queries performed (0.6 percent share of the U.S. search market). Will this smaller player eventually be able to grab a substantial share of the search market due to the site's remarkable popularity?

That's press release bait, OK? That's a nugget you're putting out in hopes that the press will eat it up. And they do, eventually. For example, in MySpace, The 27.4 Billion Pound Gorilla over at TechCrunch, the article notes at the end:

MySpace also has the sixth largest market share among search engines, even though they aren't, actually, a search engine.

I'll get to another more important press reference in a moment, but let me diverge on the "MySpace As Search Engine" idea. What's comScore counting as searches? From the May 2006 release:

qSearch includes Web searches originating from the search engines reported, other Web-based searches such as News and Image searches and channel searches conducted on portal sites (e.g., Finance and Movies). qSearch does not include Yellow Pages or Maps searches.

OK, people on MySpace searching for other MySpacers might be doing what's considered a "channel search." But that activity is extremely unlikely to translate into a search behavior that sends people to an external site or to an ad. It's simply a site search within MySpace. If that's the traffic being counted, then searches at a place like Microsoft for software support might warrant it a place on the list (and FYI, these exact types of searches have indeed gotten Microsoft mistakenly on these types of "popular search engines" lists in the past).

MySpace does allow people to search the web. Perhaps the searches counted really are only web searches (and I'm checking on this). If so, I'm still surprise to see the sudden emergence.

Why? Because of that 2.4 percent of traffic going to "others" in May 2006. Who are these others? Among them will be players like Infospace or Earthlink. For June 2006, I have NetRatings figures giving Dogpile (an Infospace property) a 0.5 percent share. That's NetRatings, not comScore, and for a different month as well. Still, it's really unusual for a new player like MySpace to just leap out of the blue like this over a more established lower tier player. When I've seen this in the past, it's simply been because suddenly, a metrics company has changed a definition and decided to count some new player that they previously ignored.

Back to MySpace. Last month, BusinessWeek cut loose with a big article about who it was seeking a search suitor, since it was such a big search powerhouse:

MySpace already drives a huge amount of traffic to search engines. It generates 100 million searches a month. In fact, 5% of all searches on the Web and 8% of all searches on Google are originated by people who come directly from MySpace.

Wow, pretty stunning numbers. And figures that frankly, I didn't believe. As I wrote in my review:

The story also gives new, amazing stats that MySpace generates 5 percent of all searches on the web. Hmm. Just a month ago, this was said to be 0.6% of all searches in the US, according to comScore. And 8 percent of all searches on Google come via MySpace? I'm checking with the BusinessWeek author, because those stats just don't make sense.

I did email the reporter, but I never heard back. Perhaps the email went astray (I mean that in all seriousness -- email does get lost or stuck in spam filters). But five percent of all searches on the web -- eight percent of all Google searches -- those are incredible numbers, if true. But they seem so untrue when you look at the 100 million figures per month stat that BusinessWeek also gives us.

The Ask network -- with a 5 percent share of just US searches -- generates 340 million searchers per month according to comScore (see the chart above). If MySpace really had 5 percent of ALL SEARCHES WEB-WIDE, then it should have far, far more than 300 million searches per month, much less 100 million.

I don't know that the BusinessWeek story came off comScore's press release bait. Heck, the stats aren't sourced at all. But when the figures start to fly and don't make sense, that's a good time for a ratings service to stop releasing them. The BusinessWeek figures weren't adding up, and perhaps that's one reason why comScore decided that MySpace no longer deserved the limelight. After listing it as a top search engine for April and May, from June onward, it fell back into the unitemized "Other" category.

I really like BusinessWeek, by the way, but this is the second time recently that I've also seen them do stumbles with figures. Many people couldn't believe the Valley Boys write-up where BusinessWeek gave Digg a $60 million valuation. Hey, I couldn't get past this section:

Digg's stature changed dramatically that day. It is now the 24th-most popular Web site in the U.S., nipping at the New York Times' (No. 19) and easily beating Fox News (No. 62), according to industry tracker Alexa.com.

Alexa? Alexa! BusinessWeek is going to use Alexa to tell us how popular a site is? Alexa, the toolbar that so many say is so easily manipulated? Honestly, I couldn't' believe it. In this story, I'm poking at comScore -- and later this week, I'll poke at Hitwise and NetRatings. But I won't even waste my time on looking at Alexa's data, since I long ago wrote it off as being useful. But if you don't believe me, check out Matt Cutts and his A Word About Metrics, Part II post. Why, if Digg can be so popular, so can Matt. He's almost as popular as Ask. Shortly, Barry Diller will be looking to acquire him.

MySpace The Google Enabler?

comScore's not the only one to play the MySpace press release bait game. Hitwise has been having fun with it, as well. Note what Om Malik wrote about why Google felt it had to partner with MySpace:

According to data collected by Hitwise, an Internet traffic tracking service, nearly 10.8% of Google's traffic was coming from MySpace.com for the week ending July 29, 2006. Had Fox gone with Yahoo or Microsoft, it could have been a serious blow to Google.

Now let's step back a minute. MySpace has shot up in traffic over time, but until recently, I never heard any connection suggesting that Google was somehow gaining because of that popularity. Google was popular because it was Google and generated its own weather. Now, suddenly, Google might potentially lose 10 percent of its traffic to its site?

That's especially amazing to digest, considering that Google had no search partnership with MySpace at the time. The web search box at MySpace was (and still is for the moment, despite the Google-MySpace deal) powered by Yahoo. If anyone would lose this "massive" amount of traffic, it should be Yahoo. And since Yahoo clearly didn't fight tooth and nail for MySpace, I don't think that search box was generating much.

So how's Google getting all this supposed traffic from MySpace. I don't know -- and Hitwise doesn't seem to know, either. Let's go to the Hitwise post on MySpace traffic: MySpace and Google: What do the Numbers Say?:

In January of this year, Google received a little over 4% of their traffic from MySpace in our U.S. sample. As of the week ending July 29th, that percentage has grown to almost 11%, making MySpace the #1 upstream site for Google.

Since over the last year there has been no formal relationship between the two companies, this high volume of traffic flowing from MySpace to Google would most likely be the result of users using their Google toolbar or manually navigating to Google while engaged in their MySpace session. It would seem that this represents a great opportunity for Google to monetize a portion of that audience through AdSense listings and increase search traffic through greater exposure on MySpace.

To be clear, all Hitwise knows is that for the ISP data is monitors, it sees that a bunch of people who leave MySpace go to Google next. It doesn't know why but can only guess that people for some reason decide to go to Google after MySpace.

If those people change their minds, would that hurt Google? Maybe -- but then again, it's not 10 percent of ALL Google's traffic, as Om wrote. It's 10 percent of the US audience. Google's not given out country-by-country breakdowns that I've seen for some time, but in the past, they'd stressed that half their traffic came from outside the US. So that would reduce the blow. What reduces the blow even further is the fact that if people are doing this out of habit, they aren't likely to break that habit regardless of who ultimately got the MySpace deal.

Poking At The Other Metrics Services

Enough of MySpace -- let's get back to the Google death plunge. One of the other things I said to look at was how the other ratings services are viewing them. For now, I'm going to give you the highlights of what Hitwise had to say about July 2006:

As you can see, the top engines combined account for over 94% of all search volume in the US. Since we last released these numbers in June 2006, Google (www.google.com) has increased its share from 59.3% to 60.2%, Yahoo! Search (search.yahoo.com) has increased from 22.0% to 22.5% and MSN Search (search.msn.com) has decreased slightly from 12.1% to 11.8%.

As you can see, Hitwise is finding that all is good with Google plus supporting the Yahoo gain that comScore also sees. So is Google in trouble? I'd say it's way, way too early to predict anything like that.

Tomorrow, I'll take a closer look at Hitwise, poke some fingers into the service and do some trending data. On Wednesday, I'll spend time with NetRatings. Then hopefully on Thursday, I'm going to drag out my special patented three-on-one ratings chart that I haven't used since the days of NetRatings, comScore and RelevantKnowledge to help you understand how to tap into multiple services to see the trends you might want to believe.

Postscript: I sent comScore some follow-up questions, and here's what I received back.

Q. General Comments?

We agree with your assessment that a single-month decline does not constitute a trend. In fact, comScore also observed a similar seasonal decline for Google during the same period last year. Fewer work days, more vacations, and reliance on academia could all contribute to Google's core user group showing lower online activity and conducting fewer searches during this time period. Bottom line – Google could be more impacted by seasonality than other engines.

Q. What happened to AOL figures in May? Am I correct that you changed your methodology and so earlier figures are no longer comparable to recent ones. If so, what exactly changed?

In June, there was a dictionary change for AOL that contributed to some of the M/M decline in Time Warner searches in the US (the dictionary defines how the Time Warner property breaks out its sites into titles, channels and sub-channels). This change does not materially alter the year-over-year market share decline that Time Warner has experienced (down nearly 3 full share points from May 05 to May 06, the last full month before the dictionary change).

Q. What happened to MySpace? You started reporting it in April 2006 out of the blue, then by June, you stopped. Was MySpace traffic being counted before April 2006, or is that the first month you looked at searches there and counted them into the searches pie? Why did they stop being broken out in June? And were they really generating more searches than someone like the Infospace network? Finally, what searches are being counted -- even those internal to MySpace to find MySpacers?

MySpace is still included in qSearch market data, we've simply chosen not to report it on our monthly market share press releases. We typically issue market share data to the press for the top 5 search sites, and simply added MySpace for a couple of months to highlight to the market that we now have the site under measurement for Web search activity. In fact, comScore data show MySpace search activity trending very nicely over the last few months.

To clarify the specifics of our MySpace reporting, we provide data for Web search only; searches done on MySpace content (e.g., user profiles, video) are not include in the MySpace totals reported in qSearch.

Q. I notice you aren't counting yellow pages or maps searches. But Google considers any local search to be part of Google Maps. Does that mean all this traffic is getting omitted now?

We do not include map-only searches in qSearch or any of our other search tracking services. There is the initial question of whether a map request actually constitutes a search, but ultimately, low marketplace demand is the primary reason for our not reporting map searches. We have, instead, chosen to concentrate our efforts and resources in the areas of greatest importance to our major search clients (i.e., all of the major search engines).

However, maps that are accompanied by business listings (as you would find in Google Maps, if you searched for a business name category) are included in comScore's Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) Search Share report. This report includes the leading IYP sites like SUperpages.com, plus the YP/business list search activity taking place on the portals. In other words, if the result is just a map, then comScore does not report that activity in any of its search reports; if the map includes or is part of Yellow Page listings, that activity is reported in our IYP Search Share report.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:16 AM | Permalink

August 8, 2006

Yahoo News Gains Search Engine News Market Share

comScore released a report showing Yahoo News has "31.2 million unique visitors" with 33 percent of all news traffic. Followed by Yahoo is MSNBC with 23.4 million or 25% share, then AOL News with 20.4 million unique visitors or 22% share. These numbers are based on June 2006 data.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:16 AM | Permalink

August 3, 2006

Google Reaches 60% Search Market Share

Bill Tancer posted over at his Hitwise blog data that shows Google has broke the 60% market share as of 7/29/06. Google has 60.2% search volume market share up from 59.3% in June, Yahoo has 22.5% share up from 22.0% and MSN has 11.8% share down from 12.1%.

Bill will be on the Search Engine Landscape Panel at SES San Jose this Monday with more stats for us.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:03 AM | Permalink

July 31, 2006

Microsoft, Google & Yahoo Make Business Week's Top 100 Best Global Brands

ResourceShelf reports on the Business Week Top 100 Global Brands release from this week. You can see from the interactive table that Microsoft remained in the number two slot, Google moved up to number 24 from the 38th position in 2005, and Yahoo also moved up to 55 from the 58th position in 2005.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:42 AM | Permalink

June 29, 2006

Google Knocks Off Apple On The Wired 40

The Wired 40 was just released and Google has secured the top spot, at number one this year. They have bumped off Apple, who last year ranked number one. Wired commented on Google with the following;

Less cuddly but more profitable than ever, the monster from Mountain View has rivals but no peers. Is it a search engine? A media company? A software provider? Who cares? Microsoft, for one. Get ready for the grudge match of the decade.

Wired is a huge Apple fan and supporter, as far as I know. For them to hand over the spot to Google, says something. Note that Yahoo is on the list at a respectable number 5.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:03 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Second In Market Share In China

TMCnet.com reports that Google is in third place in China, with 13.2% share. Yahoo is in second place with 21.1% market share and Baidu leads with 43.9%. TMCnet sources this information from the Beijing Modern Business Daily on page 1 from the Tuesday, June 27, 2006 edition.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:28 AM | Permalink

June 23, 2006

PhotoBucket Has 44% Share of Photo Sharing Sites: Beating Yahoo & Flickr

The Hitwise blog posted what I found to be surprising statistics on what is the most popular photo sharing site. I would have thought Yahoo Photos or Flickr would be a one of the most popular services, but it looks like PhotoBucket has almost 44% of the share, compared with Yahoo Photos with only 18% share in the number two spot. Even more surprising, to me at least, is that Flickr has barely 6% share, ranking number six in the list. Hitwise tells me that Photobucket surpassed Yahoo! Photos in January 2006, and its share of visits increased by 34% in the four months from February 2006 to May 2006. Flickr increased 44% in the past four months, which explains why I thought Flickr was more popular then its current rank. More details at the Hitwise blog.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:10 AM | Permalink

Technorati Betting: New Link Bait Idea

Omar emailed me that he has posted a Technorati Blog Betting competition. Basically, you bet as much as you like, on the chances that a particular blog will be at the number one spot. As Threadwatch notes, Matt Cutts has 6 to 1 odds in this competition. They currently have Matt Cutts, Robert Scoble, Engadget, and some others in the competition. This site, nor is my site in the running. Currently, the Technorati top 100 shows me at #35, Philipp at #29, ShoeMoney at #52, John Battelle at #63 and Danny (SEW) at #69.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:00 AM | Permalink

June 21, 2006

Nielsen//NetRatings Stats Keep Google On Top In May 2006

Last month, Nielsen/NetRatings had Google hitting the 50 percent mark of percentage of searches handled in the United States (when rounded up from 49.8%). This month, Google slips back down very slightly to 49 percent. I've warned before that you should be wary of month-to-month changes. That said, here's the rundown, which gives Yahoo a percentage gain to Google's loss:

Search Engine April 2006 May 2006 Google 49.8% 49.1% Yahoo 21.9% 22.9% MSN 10.7% 10.6%

More from the full release at the end of this post. Meanwhile, we already had May 2006 stats from Hitwise, so how do the two compare?

May 2006 Hitwise NetRatings Google 59% 49% Yahoo 22% 23% MSN 12% 11%

comScore's May 2006 search query stats haven't yet been publicly released. Watch for them in a future post. Past NetRatings and comScore figures are here:

• Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings
• comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings

Yes, I'm working on getting the most recent stats added to those pages. Here's the full NetRatings release:

Nielsen//NetRatings today released May 2006 U.S. MegaView Search findings, including top search providers, ranked by total searches. Searches represent the total number of queries conducted at the Provider.

Table 1: Top 10 Search Providers for May 2006, Ranked by Searches (U.S.) Please view in a fixed-width font such as Courier.

+-----------------------+-----------+------------+-------------------+ | Provider | Searches | YOY Growth | Share of Searches | | | (000) | | | +-----------------------+-----------+------------+-------------------+ | Google Search | 2,783,169 | 32% | 49.1% | | Yahoo! Search | 1,298,915 | 34% | 22.9% | | MSN Search | 600,820 | 42% | 10.6% | | AOL Search | 363,431 | N/A | 6.4% | | Ask.com Search | 146,585 | 69% | 2.6% | | My Way Search | 129,270 | 67% | 2.3% | | iWon Search | 32,257 | 53% | 0.6% | | Dogpile.com Search | 29,416 | -25% | 0.5% | | EarthLink Search | 27,488 | -1% | 0.5% | | SBC Yellow Pages | 24,513 | -21% | 0.4% | +-----------------------+-----------+------------+-------------------+

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, June 2006

Note: Due to a methodology change, year-over-year growth for AOL Search is unavailable.

Example: An estimated 2.8 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 49 percent of all search queries conducted during the given time period.

About Nielsen//NetRatings

NetRatings, Inc. (Nasdaq: NTRT) delivers leading Internet media and market research solutions, marketed globally under the Nielsen//NetRatings brand. With high quality, technology-driven products and services, Nielsen//NetRatings is the global standard for Internet audience measurement and premier source for online advertising intelligence, enabling clients to make informed business decisions regarding their Internet and digital strategies. The Nielsen//NetRatings portfolio includes panel-based and site-centric Internet audience measurement services, online advertising intelligence, user lifestyle and demographic data, e-commerce and transaction metrics, and custom data, research and analysis. For more information, please visit www.nielsen-netratings.com

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:15 AM | Permalink

Microsoft Employees Use Google More Than MSN?

Philipp Lenssen reported on a Andrew Hitchcock post that detailed search engine usage by search engine firm. It appears that Microsoft employees prefer Google to MSN Search when searching the web. At Microsoft 66.31 percent use Google, 19.65 percent use MSN and 10.18 percent use Yahoo. Yahoo employees aren't afraid to use Google search either, with 29.80 percent of searches conducted on Google and 68.87 percent on Yahoo Search. Google employees seem to be 100 percent loyal to Google search, based on the data.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:48 AM | Permalink

June 8, 2006

Hitwise: Google Nearing 60% Of Queries In US

Just over a week ago, NetRatings said Google went over the 50 percent mark in powering web searches in the US. New stats today from Hitwise put them nearing the 60 percent mark. Here's the percentage of searches each service handled over the past three months, according to Hitwise:

Domain March 2006 April 2006  May 2006 www.google.com 58.3% 58.6% 59.3% search.yahoo.com 22.3% 22.2% 22.0% search.msn.com 13.1% 12.6% 12.1%

Data based on four week period: May (4/30ￜ5/27); April (4/2ￜ4/29) and March (3/5-4/1)

How about a side-by-side of from the three major rating services? OK:

April 2006 comScore NetRatings Hitwise Google 43% 50% 59% Yahoo 28% 22% 22% MSN 13% 11% 12%

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:08 PM | Permalink

June 7, 2006

Hitwise: Google Tops For UK Web Search But Weak With Other Offerings

Figures recently released from web monitoring firm Hitwise provide mixed messages from the UK for Google and their major competitors. The bare bones of the statistics show that Google (combining the .com and .co.uk sites) continues to dominate the search market in the UK, executing more than three quarters of British searches. MSN Search and Yahoo! Search each powered just over 7 percent each. Ask.com brings up the rear with a 5 percent share. So 96 percent of searches run in the UK are run by four companies when combining the .com and UK properties. Good news for Google one might think, but it all goes downhill from there, and the statistics show that while they are tops for search, they’re far behind in most other areas.

• Email: If we look at the Hitwise comparision of the Google, Yahoo and MSN UK portals, in the area of email, MSN Hotmail gets over 52% of visits, Yahoo Mail takes a combined total of just over 23% of visits, while Google Mail languishes in 8th place with just 2.2%.  
• News: In the area of news and media the BBC unsurprisingly dominates with almost 30% of the visits going to their main site or specifically to the news page. A combination of Yahoo! news resources manages to get almost 2.5% and a combination of Google news resources doesn?t quite reach 2%.  
• Finance: In the business area, Google Finance only manages to be the 201st most visited resource, while both Yahoo! UK and Ireland Finance and MSN Money UK are in 1st and 5th place respectively.  
• Maps: Google fairs a little better when it comes to Map information with Google Maps in 3rd position with 13.11%; Google UK Maps and Google Earth account for 5th and 6th place with a combined total of 8.47.%. In the Shopping and Classifieds area Froogle manages 7th place with 2.49% and MSN Shopping in 11th with 2.16%.

Now, having got the figures out of the way, what messages can the three players take from the UK market? Google is obviously the place that the average user will go to get information, but the highest volume of searches were navigational, for sites such as eBay, Hotmail and Yahoo! To be fair, the same thing could be said of the other search engines as well; this is not a specific criticism of Google.

Indeed, the Hitwise data also shows that visitors to Google perform multiple searches, and use it as a navigational point from which to go where they want to. Clearly, UK searchers understand the power that Google has to help them find things, yet the message hasn?t got through about their other resources, and I think there are a number of reasons for this.

Experienced internet commentators know how to find out what Google and the rest are up to and which sites to visit. However, the average person in the street, when they look at the Google UK page see the search box, and they know what to do with that. They type in their search and off they go ? Google is there to help them navigate around the web.

But there?s no mention of their email offering, nothing about the calendar, or most of the other interesting things they are doing on the home page. True, there is the navigational bar above the search box, but what does that tell the inexperienced user? ?Graphics? is clear and ?News? makes sense, but ?Groups? or ?Froogle?? Unless a user is curious enough to click on the links they?ll never know. Besides, there is no incentive for them to find out, because Google is very good at what it does ? helps them navigate around the web. A searcher, particularly one who is new or unconfident really does need to be spoon fed; they need to know that if they click on something it will take them where they expect to go.

If we compare this to the Yahoo! UK & Ireland home page, there is a completely different feel. While I, as an experienced searcher might like the clear minimalist Google approach, the Yahoo! page is interesting, vibrant and it provides links that the user can follow. ?Video?, ?Audio? ?Business Finder?, ?Games?, ?Movies? all clearly explain what the user will get if they click on the link. Yahoo! Answers and ?In the News? again project Yahoo! as a place to get information and content. ?My Yahoo!? is so much more compelling than ?Personalised Home?. In short, the Yahoo! page is interesting, and pushes their visitors to other resources and content that they provide, and it?s no surprise to see that the logo in the top left leads to Finance where they are way out in front.

Now, it could be argued that the MSN UK home page does the same sort of thing as Yahoo! in providing links to different resources, but once again the feel of the page, from the searcher?s viewpoint, is entirely different. It?s quieter, more compact (or even dense), with an advert taking up a lot of the space above the fold. However, above that, and just below the search box are the options for ?My MSN?, ?Messenger? and ?Hotmail?. The names are reasonably intuitive for the novice user, and the link to ?Hotmail? is reassuring. Even the name is familiar; while we say ?Google it? when relating to search, everyone knows that ?Hotmail? refers to email.

Using an analogy to compare the three home pages, Google is a monastery ? silent and contemplative, MSN UK is a sophisticated dinner party, very refined and conversational, and Yahoo! is a loud, friendly and welcoming party. It?s no wonder that Heather Hopkins, director of research for Hitwise UK is quoted as saying ?Consumers are moving among these three Internet brands and seem to clearly distinguish the users of each. UK consumers use Google to navigate and search the web, MSN to communicate and Yahoo! for content.?

Is my analysis indepth and based on sound scientific principles? No, of course it isn?t; it?s based on being a searcher, watching and learning how other people search. People are not stupid, but equally will subconsciously take messages from the sites that they visit, and I think these statistics show quite clearly that all three companies are being very successful with the messages they are sending out. The question is, do they fully realize what those messages are?

Posted by Phil Bradley at 6:42 AM | Permalink

May 26, 2006

NetRatings: Google Tops 50 Percent Mark In US Web Searches

New stats (PDF) out from NetRatings show Google now handles half the web searches in the United States:

Search Engine April 2005 April 2006 Google 47% 50% Yahoo 22% 22% MSN 12% 11%

Need a longer view? See our NetRatings page for stats over time. I'll be getting the missing months posted soon, promise. I'm also planning a side-by-side against comScore figures. The latest of those released earlier this week show Google with a smaller chunk of the search pie but still higher than others. Here's a fast side-by-side:

April 2006 comScore NetRatings Google 43% 50% Yahoo 28% 22% MSN 13% 11%

Historical comScore figures are on our comScore page, fresh through March 2006.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:07 AM | Permalink

May 25, 2006

YouTube Dominant In Video Search, Now an Acquisition Target?

The short answer is "yes." The site -- shall we call it the "MySpace" of video :) -- is now the dominant destination for online video search, according to a press release out today from Hitwise. YouTube has an almost 50% market share.

Here's the traffic breakdown:

• YouTube ? 42.94%
• MySpace Videos ? 24.22%
• Yahoo! Video Search ? 9.58%
• MSN Video Search ? 9.21%
• Google Video Search ? 6.48%
• AOL Video ? 4.28%
• iFilm (owned by MTV/Viacom) ? 2.28%

Perhaps then we should call it the "Google of video"? (Google video is #5.) It doesn't really matter what analogy one uses, YouTube is going to be bought by one of the big players, or rather they will attempt to buy it. The stakes (and potential, future revenues) are just too high in this rapidly developing arena.

You can read more on my blog.

Also, Hitwise has some trending charts on video search and page views in YouTube vs. MySpace Video - Comparing Visits and Page Views.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 1:06 PM | Permalink

May 22, 2006

Google Continues To Gain Market Share While Others Lose

comScore released their latest stats on the "Share of Online Searches by Engine". Google gained April 2005 to April 2006 6.6 percentage points, claiming 43.1%, up from 42.7% March 2006. Yahoo with 28.0% in April 2006, dropped 2.7 percentage points from April 2005, but remained flat from March 2006 to April 2006 with 28% share. MSN dropped 3.2 percentage points claiming 12.9%, and also saw a decline from March 2006 to April 2006 by .3%. What is a bit surprising is that Ask.com's share also decreased both from April 2005 with 6.1% to March 2006 with 5.9% and then in April 2006 declining once again by .1% to 5.8% market share.

Ask.com has been doing a blitz of TV commercials, which should have increased their share from Mach to April. Maybe the newer campaigns will have a bigger impact? I will ask Danny Sullivan to possibly dig deeper into these numbers, later in the week.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 2:30 PM | Permalink

May 10, 2006

Australians Fond Of Google; Vegemite Getting Jealous

The Courier Mail reports that Australians are becoming more found of Google as each day pasts. A survey performed by George Patterson Y&R found that Google was amongst the top 20 brands in Australia. Supposedly, Vegemite, which I never heard of before, is the most popular brand in Australia, but Google is gaining on it. Can Google beat out a dark brown, salty food paste made from yeast extract, to become the number one brand in Australia?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:26 AM | Permalink

May 3, 2006

Google Not Tops In South Korea

Google fails to make inroads in South Korea from the Associated Press is a interesting look at how there's at least one country where Google is not tops or a major player: South Korea. Instead, the human-based Naver service remains far-and-away the most popular.

It's the one exception I know of where a question-answering model has succeeded and thrived, compared to those run by Google and Yahoo. The relatively small slice of the web in Korean, along with apparently poor automated search technology initially, has allowed Naver to succeed.

The story touches on Google's efforts in the country, including the promotional Google Bus that was sent around. You'll find more about Naver from us here: An Internet Search Company Hotter than Google? A Profile of Korea's NHN and Naver.com

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:25 AM | Permalink

Nearly 10 Percent Of Amazon Visitors Clicked Off To Google

Yesterday, I wrote about how Amazon had ended its relationship with Google and why not being in Amazon -- rather than Amazon-owned A9 -- was potentially the bigger issue for Google. Now in Google, Amazon and MSN, Bill Tancer over at Hitwise provides some stats detailing how Amazon, rather than A9, drove more "downstream" traffic to Google.

Bill's stats show how nearly 10 percent of all departures from Amazon went to Google, compared to only 2 percent of all departures from A9 going to Google. Also keep in mind that Amazon's traffic -- though not shown -- is certainly much larger than A9's traffic. Not only is the percentage larger, but the sheer volume of people is bigger too.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, Amazon Ditches Google For Microsoft.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:14 AM | Permalink

April 19, 2006

Revenues Up, Profits Down But Yahoo Meets Earnings Expectations

Yahoo reported a 22 percent drop in first quarter profits but met the expected earnings forecast. Yahoo profit slumps 22% in quarter from the New York Times has more details on yesterday's earnings call. Search and branding advertising revenue (sadly, they get lumped together) rose 35 percent.

Yahoo also said it had a 15 to 20 percent gain in search queries in the quarter, to counter stats from comScore showing Yahoo is losing share. There's some spin here I'll explore more later this week, when I do my stats review.

The short answer is this. Query growth is up across the board, comScore says. So sure, Yahoo will have a gain in NUMBER of queries. But the share of overall queries, according to comScore, has dropped. If that share had stayed steady, then query growth would have been even more.

Note that in a fast look I did at the latest NetRatings figures (older ones here), Yahoo's actually still looking pretty steady even in recent months. Again, I'll have more on that soon.

Some other coverage:

• Yahoo profit slides 22% Stock climbs 6% after Net company declares optimism: San Francisco Chronicle
• Yahoo results meet expectations, ads seen solid: Reuters
• 1st-quarter revenue up 34% at Yahoo, but profit falls 22%: San Jose Mercury News
• Yahoo profit drops, matches forecasts: MarketWatch
• Yahoo! Makes Numbers, Reveals Search, Streaming Plans: ClickZ

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:21 AM | Permalink

April 3, 2006

Baidu, Google Dominate Chinese Search Market

A new report from iResearch finds that Baidu and Google combined have a 90 percent market share of the Chinese search space. Baidu gets a 56.6 percent slice, followed by Google at 32.8 percent. Others are at less than five percent. China View has more details here: Baidu ranks No. 1 in China's on-line searching market. I don't see the report at iResearch yet, but you can watch for it here. China View doesn't say what time period the figures are for, but China Knowledge says they're for 2005. If so, that makes them different and slightly higher than 2005 year end figures iResearch recently released here.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, Search Market Dominator in China.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:55 AM | Permalink

Deleted Gmail Account? Kiss Your Email Goodbye!

Worried that the government's going to force Google to hand over your email? Fret not. Just delete your account. Do that, and it's gone forever, as some people are finding out.

Wait a minute! Wasn't there all that controversy about how even if you delete your mail, Google still keeps copies of it because of multiple backups? Well, it looks like those backups might not be as foolproof as they sound.

Last month, Google Blogoscoped featured the sad story of someone whose account had disappeared, which ZDNet UK later picked up on. Now in a follow up story from ZDNet, Google denies fault over Mail problems, Google explains that accounts have been deleted in only a few cases and that it is not responsible because these were cases where the users' passwords were given out to others.

For the record, Google does warn that if you delete an account:

Once you close your Gmail account, you can't reactivate it, and you won't be able to retrieve any messages. After a certain period of time, Gmail recycles your username, so we can't guarantee that it will be available if you decide to open another Gmail account.

But one who may (or may not) have been a victim of a hacked account fairly asks:

Even if someone did get my password somehow, shouldn't the original creator of the account be sent some sort of confirmation before actually going ahead with it? Gmail should pick up on that and fix this hole, otherwise it'll be chaos.

Assuming the deletion is spotted fast enough, you'd think the data wouldn't immediately disappear. After all, the Google FAQ on data retention says (bold parts are Google's own):

Some news stories have suggested that Google intends to keep copies of users' email messages even after they've deleted them, or closed their accounts. This is simply not true. Google keeps multiple backup copies of users' emails so that we can recover messages and restore accounts in case of errors or system failure. Even if a message has been deleted or an account is no longer active, messages may remain on our backup systems for some period of time. This is standard practice in the email industry, which Gmail and other major webmail services follow in order to provide a reliable service for users. We will make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical.

So fair to say, if your account was deleted and you discovered this fast enough -- I'd say within few days -- it seems like it could be restored off one of those multiple backup copies specifically retained for this type of situation.

Meanwhile, Google's Gmail fails to hit the spot from Bloomberg looks at how Gmail has far fewer users in the US than Yahoo, AOL and MSN. Of course, Gmail still remains a closed service. Yes, it's much easier for people to get accounts these days -- but I'd say having 7 million users despite the barrier Google throws up is a success, rather than failure. But the figures show a slowing in take-up despite it being easier to get in. Some are said to find the interface offputting.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:23 AM | Permalink

March 27, 2006

UK Internet Users Really Love Google; 75% Use Google

ThreadWatch covers a WebSideStory study that shows Google captured 75% of UK market share in February 2006. The breakdown amongst the top five in the UK include; Google with 74.67%, Yahoo with 9.30%, MSN with 5.46%, AOL with 4.21% and Ask with 2.28%. This is based on search referrals from about four million daily Internet users in the UK "that use a search engine to reach another site on the web," the study says. No wonder Google was voted the best brand on the Internet by UK users.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:28 AM | Permalink

March 16, 2006

Google Voted Best Internet Brand In The UK

BBC News reports that Google was voted, in the UK, the best Internet brand. The study was conducted by YouGov, which found Google to be the most "favourite online brand" brand in the UK. Google also shared the number one spot, with BBC's site, as the "most reliable website" on the Internet.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:17 AM | Permalink

February 21, 2006

Google Tops Search Loyalty Study, Though Many Searchers Aren't That Loyal

A new search loyalty study by Compete shows that Google leads its competitors by far in having the most loyal searchers, those who stick with it exclusively and don't use other services. But even Google still has nearly one-third of its searchers willing to "cheat" on it and use other search engines.

The study looked at what percentage of searchers at a particular search engine only searched using that service exclusively and no others, for December 2005. The breakdown:

• Google: 71.0%
• Yahoo: 48.1%
• MSN: 27.8%
• Excite: 23.4%
• AOL: 23.2%
• Ask: 21.6%
• AltaVista: 16.6%
• Clusty: 10.3%
• A9: 6.4%
• Lycos: 5.8%

In the example above, Google is shown as having 71 percent of its searchers only using Google and no other service. The remaining 29 percent are people who have used Google and one or more of its competitors.

The study goes into more depth, breaking down search share by "Personalized Homepage Users" and "Competitor Breakdown." You can read the full study here (PDF file, free registration required).

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:08 PM | Permalink

February 16, 2006

PPC Ad Impressions Grow 16% in 6 Months

A new Nielsen//NetRatings study shows that "sponsored link advertising impressions" grew from 55.4 billion to 64.3 billion or 16 percent during the past six months (August 2005 and January 2006). Google in August 2005 earned 36.2 billion, which increased to 41.1 billion in January 2006, a six-month increase of 14%. Yahoo percentage growth was larger than Google's, accounting for 19.2 billion in August of 2005 with an increase to 23.2 billion in January 2006 or a 21% increase in the past six-months. These figures include all of Google's and Yahoo's search partners and contextual networks. For the full release download the pdf.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 5:11 PM | Permalink

February 9, 2006

Searches Grow 55% & Google Gains 5.7% in Search Share

Late last month, Danny reported that the search share remained the "status quo." The stats from Nielsen//NetRatings shows that search growth overall has increased 55 percent from December 2004 to December 2005. And with that growth, Google gained in market share 5.7 points, whereas MSN dropped 3.1 points. However, Danny says "there's a danger in picking any two months and comparing" and even doesn't like to compare "same months from year to year."

Digging deeper into these figures, in December 2004, there was approximately 3.3 billion searches performed on search engines. In December 2005, we had nearly 5.1 billion searches, accounting for a 55 percent increase.

An other interesting note from the study was that although search volume grew 55 percent, Internet users did not grow at the same rate. Nielsen//NetRatings reports a rise of about three percent in the number of Internet users.

Google had 43.1 percent of search share in December 2004, which grew to 48.8 percent in December 2005, a 5.7 point increase.

Yahoo Search dropped 0.3 points from a 21.7 percent share in December 2004 to 21.4 percent December 2005. MSN Search lost 3.1 points from 14.0 percent share in to 10.9 for the same months.

If you review the average search share from Danny's previous entry, you can still see an increase in Google's share and a decrease for Yahoo and MSN. Danny reported Google at 46.7 percent, Yahoo at 22.0 percent, and MSN at 12.4 percent as the average monthly share for the period of January 2005 through November 2005.

The press release hasn't yet gone live on the NetRatings site but should here shortly. Here's what we received:

ONLINE SEARCHES GROW 55 PERCENT YEAR-OVER-YEAR TO NEARLY 5.1 BILLION SEARCHES IN DECEMBER 2005, ACCORDING TO NIELSEN//NETRATINGS

Google Sees Five-Point Gain in Search Share Rankings

NEW YORK- February 9, 2006 - Nielsen//NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research, today reported that the total number of searches in the U.S. conducted across approximately 60 search engines grew 55 percent year-over-year to nearly 5.1 billion searches in December 2005 (see Table 1). There were 3.3 billion searches conducted via search engines in December 2004.

While the number of searches conducted online swelled, the number of people connecting to the Internet rose a mere three percent to 207 million people in the U.S.

?The double-digit increase in online search activity marks a significant milestone

in the evolution of Internet consumer behavior,? said Ken Cassar, senior director

of analytics, Nielsen//NetRatings. ?Online search is the primary tool most people rely on to do everyday research.?

Table 1. Growth in Total Searches, Dec 2004 vs. 2005 (U.S.) Please view in a fixed-width font such as Courier.

+------------------------+------------------------+-----------------+ | Dec-04 Searches (000) | Dec-05 Searches (000) | Percent Change | +------------------------+------------------------+-----------------+ | 3,279,770 | 5,069,377 | 55% | +------------------------+------------------------+-----------------+

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, February 2006

Google rose nearly six percentage points to garner a 49 percent share of all searches in December 2005 from a year prior (see Table 2). Yahoo! Search and MSN Search experienced slight declines in their search share points.

Table 2. Top 3 Percentage Point Changes in Search Share Rankings (U.S.) Please view in a fixed-width font such as Courier.

+---------------+-----------------+-----------------+--------------------+ | Search Engine | Dec-04 Search | Dec-05 Search | Change in | | | Share | Share | Percentage Points | +---------------+-----------------+-----------------+--------------------+ | Google Search | 43.1% | 48.8% | 5.7 | | Yahoo! Search | 21.7% | 21.4% | -0.3 | | MSN Search | 14.0% | 10.9% | -3.1 | +---------------+-----------------+-----------------+--------------------+

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, February 2006

The top three search engines all experienced double-digit growth year-over-year in December 2005. Google Search grew 75 percent to nearly 2.5 billion searches; Yahoo! Search rose 53 percent to nearly 1.1 billion searches, and MSN Search increased 20 percent to 553 million searches (see Table 3).

Table 3. Top 3 Search Engines' Growth in Searches (U.S.) Please view in a fixed-width font such as Courier.

+----------------+---------------------+------------------+-------------+ | Search Engine | Dec-04 Searches | Dec-05 Search | Growth (%) | | | (000) | (000) | | +----------------+---------------------+------------------+-------------+ | Google Search | 1,414,778 | 2,475,895 | 75% | | Yahoo! Search | 711,857 | 1,085,918 | 53% | | MSN Search | 460,377 | 553,476 | 20% | +----------------+---------------------+------------------+-------------+

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:57 AM | Permalink

February 3, 2006

A9's Low Popularity & Slower Growth

NetRatings sent out some Amazon stats in advance of their earnings report. Interesting to me was a breakout on A9. It shows growth from the fourth quarter of 2004 to the same period of 2005. However, growth from the third to the fourth quarter of 2005 is nowhere near as much as Amazon itself or the Amazon-owned Internet Movie Database. Traffic to both those sites is much higher than A9:

Monthly Unique Audience, In Millions, Q4 2004 Vs. Q4 2005

Site Q4 2004 Q4 2005 Change Amazon 37,323 43,183 16% IMDb 10,717 16,394 53% A9 792 1,369 73%

Monthly Unique Audience, In Millions, Q3 2004 Vs. Q4 2005

Site Q3 2005 Q4 2005 Change Amazon 36,339 43,183 19% IMDb 13,794 16,394 19% A9 1,282 1,369 7%

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:01 AM | Permalink

February 2, 2006

Search as a Predictor of the Future?

Yahoo Research has created an interesting fantasy investment game that allows you to buy and sell "stocks" in companies developing new technologies, and watch how these stocks perform in part based on how popular search terms related to the technology are on Yahoo. More on this intriguing game in today's SearchDay article, Searching for the Future.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:51 AM | Permalink

January 24, 2006

Latest NetRatings Stats Show Status Quo With Search Engines

I always warn not to worry much about month-to-month changes with search popularity stats. The now updated search engine popularity stats I've posted from Nielsen//NetRatings illustrate why. I've added data for the past four months, and it shows no real major changes over that period. Indeed, you can look at all the data going back to the beginning of last year. It shows things have pretty much not changed -- good news for Yahoo, which is happy to maintain the status quo.

Here's one of the two charts from my stats page, which shows the share of searches each search engine was estimated to have among US searchers in a particular month (the page explains more):

What do we see? Yahoo's gained a point and Google's lost one since the beginning of the year. AOL's gained two points and MSN's lost two over the same period.

However, there's a danger in picking any two months and comparing. What if I'd started the chart off in February, rather than January? Then Google stayed the same, Yahoo gained two points, AOL one, and MSN was the big loser with a three point loss.

Maybe you should compare the same months from year to year, November 2004 to November 2005, for example. I still have problems with that. Perhaps one search engine had a new feature or was doing a lot of promotions in a particular month. A month-to-month comparison would still be misleading, in that case.

My preference is to just look at the lines over time. They show me Yahoo's got very slight growth overall, while the rest have some slight decline overall. But none of these changes are particularly dramatic to say that anyone's winning anything, which is why I still feel it's status quo.

For the number inclined, here's the average monthly share for the period of January 2005 through November 2005:

• Google: 46.7%
• Yahoo: 22.0%
• MSN: 12.4%
• AOL: 5.8%

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:26 PM | Permalink

January 22, 2006

Google Back on Top as the World's Most Influential Brand; Skype Places Third

One of Google's most valuable assets that Google has is its name and brand. The 2005 brandchannel.com/Interbrand Fifth Annual (2005) Readers' Choice Awards have just been released and Google has reclaimed its top position as the world's most influential brand beating out Apple (now in second place). Also, showing the growing importance and awareness of VoIP, Skype made the Top 5 list for the first time and placed third.

A year ago we blogged about Apple overtook Google for the top spot on the list. Google had been selected the most influential brand in 2003.

The complete report from brandchannel.com is posted here with Reuters offering highlights and background here.

From Reuters: "...this year, the 2,528 branding professionals and students who voted came up with more conventional and--perhaps unsurprisingly for an online poll--tech-heavy answers when asked "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2005?...Skype, which offers free calls using Voice over Internet Protocol, crashes in at third place in the global list, while omnipresent coffee chain Starbucks and Swedish furniture chain Ikea take fourth and fifth place respectively. The poll does not take account of economic brand value, the dark science of assigning a financial value to brands, which regularly puts Coca-Cola's Coke in first place."

Here are a few highlights from the results. Analysis and methodology from brandchannel.com here.

Top Brand (Global)

1. Google
2. Apple
3. Skype (First Time on the List)
4. Starbucks
5. Ikea

Also on the Top 10 Brands list (Global) are: Yahoo (7th) and Firefox (8th)

The brandchannel.com report also offers lists with the The Top 5 Brands in different parts of the world. Google places second in North America while Apple is on top of this list.

On the Europe and Africa list, Nokia is first while Skype is listed third. The breakdown of Asian firms has Sony in the top spot while Toyota and Samsung follow. Corona, Bacardi, movistar are the Top 3 in Central and Latin America.

We've posted about other brand studies on the blog. They include: Google and Yahoo Both Make Top 10 of 2005 ImagePower® Newsmaker Brands Survey and The Top 100 Global Brands: Where Do Google and Yahoo Place? This list that was released in October 2005 (it looks at several factors including company value) from BusinessWeek has Google in 38th place and Yahoo in 58th position.

Other companies on the BusinessWeek Top 100 list include: + Microsoft in 2nd position + Apple in 41st position + Amazon.com in 68th position

The Top 5 Companies on the latest BusinessWeek list are:

1. Coca-Cola

2. Microsoft

3. IBM

4. GE

5. Intel

Posted by Gary Price at 4:10 PM | Permalink

January 19, 2006

Keynote Says Google, Yahoo Preferred in North America

Keynote Systems has released the results of its annual study of North American searchers and their satisfaction with search engines. The study ranked user satisfaction by tracking the search behavior of 2,000 users on AOL Search, Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo, and found Google and Yahoo were clear #1 and #2 favorites, respectively. Today's SearchDay article, Survey: Google, Yahoo Still Favorites in North America, has the details. Also see yesterday's SearchDay article, Study: Google #1 in China, for details of a similar study Keynote performed in China.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:47 AM | Permalink

December 29, 2005

YouTube Pops Above Google Video Thanks To SNL Clip

So here's a mashup for you. I wrote earlier about YouTube and how I didn't really trust Alexa data to prove the popularity of anything. Gary wrote of a popular Saturday Night Live skit being shared through places like YouTube and Google Video. LeeAnn Prescott over at Hitwise puts the two together with some nice charts to show YouTube's rising popularity plus a big boost it got thanks to that SNL clip.

SNL Chronicles of Narnia Rap causes YouTube to Overtake Google Video Search is the rundown, and you can see how it caused a big uptick at YouTube -- so much so that YouTube overtook Google Video in usage. But also note that YouTube has been steadily gaining for the past few months. The Hitwise data I trust more than Alexa monitoring, so color me convinced that the service is growing! Yahoo Video remains well above both of the other services, however. What's not growing is AOL's long established Singingfish site.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:15 AM | Permalink

December 20, 2005

With One Link, Google Book Search Becomes Google's 5th Most Popular Service

Google Print Is Google's Ninth Most Popular Service here on the blog last month covered how according to Hitwise, Google Print -- since renamed Google Book Search -- made the top ten of most used Google services, though usage was only by a tiny 0.4 percent of Google visitors. Since then, a small change by Google has dramatically increased the visits to Google Book search and pushed it into being the fifth most popular service it offers.

Bill Tancer of Hitwise, who loves nothing more than to play with the stats his competitive analysis service has on user behavior, dropped me an update yesterday showing how the Google top ten line up had changed from the last time I wrote about it. Here's the rundown:

Service

Week Ending Nov. 5

Week Ending Dec. 10

Point Change

Percent Change Google Web Search

79.9%

79.1%

-0.9%

-1.1% Google Image Search

9.2%

9.3%

0.1%

1.2% Google Mail/Gmail

5.6%

5.4%

-0.3%

-4.5% Google News

1.6%

1.5%

-0.1%

-4.4% Google Book Search

0.4%

1.5%

1.1%

322.9% Froogle

0.7%

0.9%

0.2%

33.3% Google Maps

0.8%

0.7%

-0.1%

-13.3% Google Earth

0.3%

0.5%

0.2%

69.0% Google Groups/ Groups 2 Beta

0.5%

0.5%

-0.1%

-9.4% Google Directory

0.2%

0.2%

0.0%

6.3%

As you can see, Google Web Search remains the most used service by far. Google Book Search, which had been the ninth most popular service, moved up to position five.

Notice the point change and percent change columns. The first shows the raw percentage point change between the two time periods. Google Web Search had a dip of less than 1 percent, so no major change. Google Book Search had a point change of just over 1 percent. In the case of that service, this was a big deal.

Why? The percentage change column tells the story. That 1 percent point increase for Google Book Search means relatively speaking, it went up over 300 percent in traffic -- more than three times the number that used it a month ago are now turning to the service. In contrast, a 1 percent change either way with Google Web Search is a drop in the bucket.

So what gives? What happened? Cast your mind back to mid-November, when Google started putting at the bottom of regular search results pages this message:

Try your search again on Google Book Search

For more on that change, see Google SERPs pushing Google Books at our SEW Forums, When Will Google Do An Amazon at Smart Keywords and Google Book Search Within SERPs at Search Engine Roundtable.

Was the change responsible for the increase? And what about Google Groups, which has had somewhat similar promotion on the bottom of results? The chart tells the tale:

You can see that just after Google Book Search links were added, traffic to Google Book Search skyrocketed. Being on the first page of search results is clearly powerful, as search marketers obviously know. As for Google Groups, it didn't change. This may be because Google Groups links never always appeared, in contrast to Google Book Search links, which seem to always show up. It could also be that more people find the Google Book Search link more relevant.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:57 AM | Permalink

December 14, 2005

Nielsen: Search Queries Up, Google Has 48% of All Searches, Ask Jeeves Soars in Search Volume

The MediaWeek article: Nielsen: Google Dominates, Local Grows, reports that new October, Nielsen//NetRatings ratings numbers have been released. Here are some highlights:

+ In October, Nielsen//NetRatings recorded 5.1 billion total search queries That's up 15% from June. As Mike Shields writes, search providers are, "going after an expanding search pie."

+ Google accounted for nearly 2.5 billion searches in October, up 21 percent versus June activity. That's 48 percent share of all searches.

+ Yahoo, 22 percent of searches, up 16 percent in volume over the measured five month period

What provider had the biggest gain in overall search volume? Ask Jeeves, soon to be Ask. From the article: The search engine exhibiting the largest growth during the measuring period was AskJeeves, which saw its search queries soar by 77 percent, though Barry Diller's Web asset still claims less than 3 percent of the market.

Categories: + Searching for photo-related material up 37% since June + Local search up 19% since June + General web searches exceeded 4.5 million queries

You can find more numbers and commentary in this Nielsen//NetRatings news release (PDF).

From the release: The top four search players, Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL have maintained the same rankings in the past five months with little to no change in market share. Ask Jeeves leapt into the top five spot, garnering a 2.1 percent market share in August, edging out My Way Search, and has maintained its top five position in subsequent months. In October, Ask Jeeves held a search market share of 2.6 percent.

Btw, the release also has info on MSN and AOL. Both companies are not mentioned in the MediaWeek article.

+ MSN, 11.3% of searches, up 8% in past five months.

+ AOL, 7.2% of searches, up 3% in past five months.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:03 PM | Permalink

November 29, 2005

Travel Searchers Still Hitting General Search Engines

Partnerships are key to online travel search survival from Reuters covers some stats and developments with travel search. Only 6.5 percent of travelers have used travel search engines, compared to 44 percent who use a travel agency, data from Forrester has found. About 27 percent turned to general purpose search engines like Google or Yahoo, rather than meta search sites -- though what's not said is some of them no doubt clicked on results that led them to more specialized travel search sites.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:09 AM | Permalink

The State of Shopping Search, 2005

Today's SearchDay article, Shopping Search Week 2005, kicks off my annual review of the comparison shopping search space, looking at changes over the past year, discussing traffic stats and trends and more. Later in the week I'll take a detailed look at the leaders in the space, as well as promising newcomers that will likely have an impact over the course of the coming year.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 3:42 AM | Permalink

November 8, 2005

Google Print Is Google's Ninth Most Popular Service

With all the debate over what Google Print might do to publishers, I was wondering if anyone was even using the service? Surely it wouldn't even crack the top ten of the most used Google services. As it turns out, indeed it does.

I turned to Bill Tancer of competitive intelligence service Hitwise, who showed on his great blog recently how most traffic from Google Print flows "downstream" to online book sellers.

That's not surprising, given that Google provides links to booksellers as part of the pages it displays in Google Print. FYI, last time we checked, Google said it does not earn of off any book sales generated from visits that Google Print generates.

But how many people actually use Google Print at all? Bill said Hitwise couldn't generate audience estimates, but he did give me a percentage breakdown of traffic to all Google sites for a one week period ending Nov. 5. The summary is below (rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent for all visits, except those below a tenth of a percent):

1. Google Web Search: 79.9 percent
2. Google Image Search: 9.2 percent
3. Google Mail/Gmail: 5.6 percent
4. Google News: 1.6 percent
5. Google Maps: 0.8 percent
6. Froogle: 0.7 percent
7. Google Scholar: 0.6 percent
8. Google Groups/Groups 2 Beta: 0.5 percent
9. Google Print: 0.4 percent
10. Google Earth: 0.3 percent
11. Google Directory: 0.2 percent
12. Google Local: 0.1 percent
13. Google Answers: 0.1 percent
14. Google AdWords: 0.06 percent
15. Google Desktop Search: 0.04 percent
16. Google Talk: 0.02 percent

As you can see, Google Print doesn't have a ton of use compared to other Google services -- but it was still impressive to see it cracked the top ten.

Also notice how Google Local is below Google Maps. Google recently turned Google Maps into Google Local, and it's not hard to see why. If Google Maps was getting more traffic, the merging the two was an easy way to get more usage of local.

However, earlier this year Google said that Google Local was more popular than Froogle. It could be that Hitwise might not be counting the Google Maps/Google Local visits correctly due to the change. I'm checking with Bill on this and will postscript a follow up.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:37 PM | Permalink

Why We Use Various Search Engines

InternetRetailer has done some nice charts off of a Majestic Research/comScore report looking at why we use particular search engines (for Google, it's the results; for others, it's because you're doing other things). The stats also look at awareness of paid links and tolerance of demographic and behavior targeting. Here's a summary:

For the question of why people use particular search engines, top reasons for each major service were:

• Google: 68 percent say it's because it has the best results.  
• AOL: 65 percent say it's because they are doing other things at AOL, like checking mail and other non-search activities.  
• MSN: 63 percent say it's just like AOL, because they are doing other things there.  
• Yahoo: 52 percent say it's just like AOL, because they are doing other things there. Yahoo got the second highest marks for having the best results after Google, with 33 percent choosing that reason.

The report found that AOL and Google users were the most likely to notice sponsored links (82 and 81 percent, respectively) while MSN users were the least likely to notice them (69 percent).

As for privacy, 58 percent said they weren't worried about being demographically or behaviorally targeted as long as it was disclosed and they could opt out. And 27 percent said they'd keep using a search engine even if they couldn't opt out.

Haven't tracked down the actual report yet; will postscript, if I can find it.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:11 PM | Permalink

October 13, 2005

Hitwise: Google Leads in UK Search Race

According to new research from Hitwise, Google powers 7 in 10 UK searches. The study also reported that 94% of all UK searches come from the top four engines.

Overall ...Google, Ask, Yahoo Search, and MSN Search powered nearly 19 out of 20 (94%) UK internet searches. This equates to 14% of search engines (8 out of 57) powering 94% of searches, and the trend for consolidation is increasing, the research revealed.

October 2004 vs. October 2005 Comparing the four weeks ending 1 October 2005 and the four weeks ending 2 October 2004, the volume of searches powered by the combined UK and .com properties of Google, MSN Search, Yahoo! Search and Ask has increased by 70%. "These gains have been driven by growth in searches performed on Google UK and MSN.co.uk Search", said Heather Hopkins, director of research for Hitwise UK. Hopkins added, "MSN and Google have been extremely successful at promoting their search toolbars, driving up the volume of UK searches they power. MSN has also likely benefited from the default search page on Internet Explorer."

Google UK Domination Google UK continues to dominate the search engine market in the UK, powering 63% of all internet searches in the four-week period ending 1 October 2005. Collectively Google UK and Google.com power 70% of UK Internet searches.

MSN.co.uk placed second with 8% of all UK searches for the same four week time frame.

More in the Netimperative article: Google powers 7 in 10 UK searches.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:34 PM | Permalink

September 26, 2005

OneStat Puts Google On Top

OneStat has released its latest results of most popular search engines worldwide, putting Google first on average over the past two months. The figures:

1. Google 56.9%
2. Yahoo 21.2%
3. MSN Search 8.9%
4. AOL Search 3.2%

It said that MSN Search's share rose from 8.6 to the current 8.9 percent over the past eight months, while Yahoo stayed stable and Google dropped from 57.2 percent to the current 56.9 percent.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:10 AM | Permalink

Blog Buzz News: PubSub Improvements Coming, BuzzMetrics Sold

PubSub to Measure Blog Influence by Category from ClickZ says that PubSub is supposed to release a new version of its LinkRanks service, to help you find key blogs in various topics. Watching to see what comes up. No news yet on the PubSub blog. Top of my list is a hope that PubSub goes back and measures links from actual blog posts rather than just feeds, because of the problems with this I covered before. Meanwhile, BuzzMetrics Bought By Israel-Based Trendum covers word-of-mouth firm BuzzMetrics being bought by Trendum.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:00 AM | Permalink

September 13, 2005

Mobile Search Done By Few, But Still Popular Mobile Internet Activity Overall

How's search as a mobile internet activity? The Utilitarian Life of the Mobile Internet at ClickZ cites stats saying it's the third ranked category in the US for June 2005 according to Telephia, behind email (done by 4.8 percent of mobile users) and weather (3.9 percent). Search is done by 2.9 percent of the mobile audience. As you can see, all categories have a small number of the 191 million estimated mobile internet users doing anything -- but when they do go online while on the move, search is strong.

Most likely category of users to do mobile search? Those aged 35-41 (32 percent). OK, that's the most likely category to do email and weather, as well, suggesting to me they've got tech savvy plus the money to spend on devices and access. But interestingly, search is the most likely mobile activity by 18-24 years olds over others, including email and weather.

Most popular mobile search site? Google, with 2.1 percent of the mobile internet audience reach. Yahoo comes next at 1.4 percent. But Yahoo Mail is the second most popular destination overall at 2.4 percent, and Yahoo Driving Directions makes the list with 1 percent reach.

The ClickZ article has all the charts; original charts and details from Telephia here (PDF file).

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:50 PM | Permalink

September 7, 2005

Yandex Big In Russia, Google Gaining

The new Multilingual Search blog has a short brief on Russian search engine Yandex, apparently the most popular in the country. But Google is gaining. It points to a stats service here for Russian search engines. I can't say how valid the figures are or not. The Multilingual blog provides a bit more about the stats service here, as well as much more on Yandex.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:01 AM | Permalink

September 6, 2005

Google's China Situation Better Than You Might Think -- And Other China Search News

The China Internet Network Information Center has released a new China Online Search Market Survey Report  (PDF file) outlining the search market in China that's well worth a read. And despite headlines you may have seen from this report that painted a gloomy picture for Google, actually reading the report makes me think Google's much better off than you might think.

Let's do some headlines first:

• Google loses China market share (BBC)
• Google losing ground in China (AP)

The conventional wisdom from limited research released previously on search in China has put home grown search engine Baidu as the category leader. However, when you drill down into this recent report, you find that in specific types of searches, Google probably has the healthier outlook. IE, Baidu may lead with those interested in downloading music, but for those seeking things like shopping and business information, Google is very strong.

Let's dive in with the report's breakdown of the Beijing market share:

• Baidu: 51.5%
• Google: 32.9%
• Sohu: 4.6%
• Sina: 4.0%
• Yahoo: 3.7%
• Others: 3.3%

Market shares for Shanghai and Guangzhou are also listed, but the figures aren't super radically different, so I didn't make a chart up showing all of them side-by-side. Mainly, Baidu slips below the 50 percent mark for these other cities but is still the leader. Google always holds at a healthy second. Yahoo (which can mean 3721, Yisou, Yahoo China or Yahoo anywhere) comes up into third place.

Some important caveats on the figures, however. The report says:

• A search engine's market share is determined by the number of users who use that particular search engine as their only or primary one, divided by the number of total users.  
• "Baidu users" refers to those who use Baidu as their only or primary search engine, and so on.

In other words (as I read it), if someone said that "Baidu" was their primary search engine, then that person counts entirely toward Baidu regardless of whether they also use Google, Sohu or another service. That produces a skew to the data. You obviously want to be the first choice of users, but it could be that for particular types of searches, another search engine might rank better than for the overall totals.

To me, a better way of looking at search market share is to look at actual volume of searches. Our pages for stats from NetRatings, Hitwise and comScore all have figures using this type of basis along with explanations of why it is important.

In fact, the report notes later that Baidu/Google or Google/Baidu are the most popular combinations for searchers, making up 55 percent of those who use two or more search engines.

The report also has a chart showing popularity of search engine by those brand new to searching in the last 6 months. Baidu leads at 48.2 percent, followed by Sohu at 19.6 percent and then Google at 12.5 percent.

There's also a breakdown of what people search for, which is incredibly revealing. More people at Google search for web sites, shopping and business information and reference material than corresponding searchers at Baidu. What's big -- what's powering searches at Baidu? Apparently downloadable music.

In other words, perhaps Baidu is so popular in China because it has served as a type of Napster for the nation. If so, then Google has far less to worry about in the "race" for China, since if these are illegal downloads, it's not a business it wants or can be in. Indeed, just before Baidu went public, it had to act to remove links to pirated music to help sooth copyright concerns.

A chart showing those who use Baidu as their "primary" search engine and Google as "secondary" search engine is fascinating. Baidu "primary" users turn massively to Google for if they can't find their search need (outside of music search) or for undefined "alternative" uses. In contrast, what do those who use Google as their primary search engine depend on at Baidu for their secondary needs? Music search.

A later chart breaks down market share in across a particular vertical segments. In other words, what percentage of all music searchers go to Baidu? A big 74.6 percent. Baidu keeps the majority of searchers also for images and photos (67.8%) and online games (61.0%). After that, it still has more searchers in all but two categories, but the margin over Google is less.

Google wins in the share of those seeking maps, city guides and travel info -- 41.8 percent of searchers to Baidu's 38.8 percent. Google also ties with Baidu for those seeking shopping and business information, 42.5 percent.

There are other Google wins I think are significant. The more money you have, the more likely you are to search with Google. At the highest income level surveyed, those with 5,000 yuan per month (about US $600) or higher, Google has 58.1 percent of the searchers to Baidu's 25.7 percent.

The report summary says that Google's lost market share to Baidu and suggest the worry for Google is that a rising generation might not consider it "cool." But if that's "cool" in terms of downloading free music, Napster's coolness didn't help it thrive. It's not the type a cool that a business may want to be.

My other problem with this is the report showed no historic trends that I can see. Outside of the survey of those brand new to the web, there's no tracking of Google's "lost" share, though I have no reason to doubt Baidu growth in popularity. However, the aforementioned AP article does have some market share increases for Beijing (Baidu up 10 percent) and says Gogole was the largest in all three cities just six months ago, although it too says the report doesn't share figures on this.

Elsewhere in the report are nice overview demographics of searchers in China:

• 86 percent of Beijing's internet users have used online search  
• On any day, 38 percent are using search engines, along with frequency of searching  
• 40 percent of searchers are students, nearly half of which are in secondary school  
• Non student searchers are mostly (62 percent) aged 25-40  
• 66 percent of searchers use two or more brand name search engines  
• Male/female breakdown of searchers  
• Breakdown by education (Google has a whopping 75 percent of users with a doctorate and 50 percent of those with postgraduate degrees. Baidu is the industry leader in all other education categories starting from middle school and including those with 4 year degrees)

For more, the LA Times had an excellent article three weeks ago, "Baidu.com Went From Unknown to No. 1 Search Engine in China" from the LA Times. It was here and is still listed on Google News as if it is there, but now you have to buy here.

The article looked at how the Chinese governments blocking of Google has helped boost Baidu presence in China, suggesting even that Baidu employees might report things the Chinese government might want to block -- an accusation Baidu's CFO said he wasn't aware of. I'd been wondering if blocking like this, however it happened, could have helped with Baidu's rise. Apparently so.

Internet Search Giants Hurry Into Chinese Market from Dow Jones is another nice recent read looking at the growth of the Chinese search marketing and interest in it. A nice refresher, for those wanting to catch up on recent moves.

Meanwhile, Autonomy readies for content wars looks at how enterprise search company Autonomy has partnered with one of China's biggest internet companies to create a news and video search service for the country.

Finally, I mentioned last week the new Chinawhite blog where Shakil Khan -- known as Shak on to those of various search forums -- will be covering news of search out of China. Check it out. And if you want to learn more about Shak, China White from Matt Marshall over at SiliconBeat out today has a great profile of him.

Postscript: You'll find that LA Times article now available free to registered members at the San Jose Mecury News here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:44 PM | Permalink

Revisiting Technorati's Blog Finder & Listing Issues

Gary Price wrote earlier of Technorati's new Technorati Blog Finder, along with some issues with the new beta service. For our Search Engine Watch members, the Revisiting Technorati's Blog Finder & Listing Issues article I've now posted take a longer look at the new service, how it operates and ways blog owners can consider improving their performance within it. In summary, the article covers:

• How the service provides a new way for those seeking blogs about particular topics -- rather than blog posts -- to locate them.  
• A step-by-step look at how site owners can set their tags to anything they want, which directly impacts which tag categories they show up in.  
• Strategies on how to select the best 20 tags for your blog.  
• How "searches" on Blog Finder only bring up tags specifically matched with those words -- and how you remain essentially invisible for anything you haven't specifically tagged your blog for.  
• How sites are listed by Technorati rank, derived from looking at all the links on the home pages of blogs that point at your blog.  
• How the tagging system brings back the "bad old days" of the meta keywords tag, where you have to include singular, plural, stemmed and alternative terms. IE, want to show up for things related to blogging? You'd need to tag yourself blog, blogs, blogging and blogger!  
• How anyone can claim any blog at the moment to tag it however they like, even if they don't verify ownership. Don't panic, in that they don't seem to be able to overwrite any settings done on a blog you've claim. Rather, they can set up a parallel claim and put you in categories/tags they want.  
• How searches currently don't match titles and descriptions of tags, meaning that you can't find them by name -- but this is something Technorati says it will fix in the future. "We wanted to provide the most value up-front as the first product feature but we are certainly not finished with the product and take our beta badges seriously," said Technorati community manager Niall Kennedy.  
• How stemming and other consolidation may come in the future, so that people don't have to think of every related variation of a topic.  
• How a bug last Friday that seemed to prevent changes from being saved has been cleared up.  
• How relevancy issues remain, in that people can deliberately misassign their blogs or accidentally get categories in areas they really aren't relevant for.

As a blog owner, should you even care about Technorati? After all, it's taken mounting criticisms over performance issues, as many are aware. Despite this, the service remains popular and something that many in the blog world care about. It's easy to improve your listings in the new service at the moment and worth a few minutes to do so.

As someone seeking blogs, the new finder service helps Technorati counter some criticism its taken over its Top 100 list. The plus to the Technorati system is that it allows, as it says, for people to make mini Top 100 lists in any particular topic.

That's what someone like Robert Scoble wants, but the tagging system it's based on leaves all types of issues. My article for members, as Gary's previous review of Blog Finder, shows the problems you get with having to think of plural and stemming terms, not to mention alternative terms (search marketing or search engine marketing -- you've gotta do both). Josh Hallett covers some further criticisms as well here, plus points to a variety of other observations worth checking out.

Still want more top blog lists? There's the Feedster Top 500 list that came up recently and there's the existing Bloglines list.

Also be sure to check out Yahoo's blog & feed finding service. I feel it's poorly known, in particular because Yahoo needs to do a much better job in making it visible.

My past Yahoo Feed Search & Web Search Feeds Update post explains the service more and the Submitting To Yahoo's Feed Search post looks at webmaster issues plus touches on how it provides the type of mini-Top 100 lists that some want.

If you're a SEW member, a longer version with many more details on the submitting side is here.

Want to discuss Blog Finder? Please visit our Search Engine Watch Forums and start a thread!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:56 AM | Permalink

August 25, 2005

AOL News Now A Top News Search Destination

Today's SearchDay, AOL News Joins the Big League of News Search Engines by guest writer Greg Jarboe, looks how AOL News has quietly become a top news search site, even surpassing Google News, though Yahoo News remains comfortably ahead.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:17 PM | Permalink

August 23, 2005

NetRatings: Google Top Ranked In July 2005 Though Others Show Rises

I've posted the latest stats from NetRatings for search engine popularity for July 2005 on our Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings. As with comScore and Hitwise that I blogged earlier, it's Google that's top ranked among US services. The trend chart shows changes month-by-month over the past year. Google seen a slight dip over the past two months, with others especially AOL slight rises. As always, a trend is more a trend to me when you see it go on for months and months and months.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:34 PM | Permalink

Hitwise: Google Also Tops In July 2005 & Awesome Report On US Search Landscape

Similar to the comScore data I just posted, the latest Hitwise stats show Google was the most popular search engine in the US, in July 2005. Our Hitwise Search Engines Ratings page is now updated with full details. Google's had noticeable gains over the past three months, as has AOL. Most others have generally had tiny declines -- small enough that they are essentially static.

Hitwise also is offering its new Hitwise US Online Search Report (free upon request) that's chock full of stats for those interested in the search landscape. It's not always Google tops, as you look across the diverse range of search activities that happen. The report is highly recommended reading. Some highlights:

• Google Dominant: The report has top search engines for the week of July 23, 2005, based on share of visits. Similar to what our Hitwise stats posted show, Google is top ranked, with more than double the share of its closest competitor, Yahoo.  
• Image Search Grows: The report says Google Image Search nearly doubled and Yahoo Image Search more than doubled traffic when comparing the week of July 23, 2005 to the same period in 2004.  
• Google's Share Growing: Based on share of actual searches, Google is reported to have grown from 51.9 percent in July 2004 to 59.2 percent in July 2005. Over the same period, Yahoo and MSN saw decreases.  
• Shopping Top Downstream Destination: Across the board, people head to shopping and classified sites more than any other types, after doing a search. Entertainment and Business & Finances are also popular categories.  
• Portals Power Search: Yahoo and MSN are shown to get a significant number of searches from those who start out on their portal pages (FYI, a slight skew here in my opinion. Many searching from www.yahoo.com may not consider themselves starting from the "portal" home page since for most people, that does double-duty as the main Yahoo search page despite the existance of search.yahoo.com).  
• Insight Into Driving Network Traffic: The report notes that Yahoo manages to drive 8 percent of searches back into its own network. Google drives 7 percent of its traffic to Google-related sites, with Google Images the top destination among these, getting 5 percent of the share.  
• Yahoo Local Greater Than Google Local: Yahoo's local search had four times the visits of Google's local search, though Google's service has grown 61 percent over the past six months. Local searchers are also slightly more likely to be female.  
• Yahoo & Ask Local For Maps: Yahoo and Ask were found to be driving most traffic to their map sites, while Google was driving traffic to a range of sources, including Yahoo and SuperPages.  
• Query Terms: Queries are generally one to two words long except for Ask, where its history of encouraging users to ask questions generates queries typically three or more words in length.  
• Top Queries: Navigational terms rule on the search engines, with top queries often those for sites such as eBay or Mapquest. Top term on Yahoo and MSN? The name of their chief rival -- Google! Ask is notable for not having its top list be dominated by navigational queries.  
• Demographics: Google is slightly more male in terms of users, with Ask being more female. Yahoo is more younger; MSN more older, in terms of audience profiles. Google's got the highest number of visitors with incomes over $100,000.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:54 AM | Permalink

Google Top Search Engine In July 2005; Toolbar-Based Queries Grow & Yahoo Tops There

I've posted the latest comScore search engine ratings for July 2005 on our comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings page. As is usual, Google is the top ranked search engine in the US, based on the share of those searching at the site for the US. Google came in with a 36.5 percent share, followed by Yahoo at 30.5, then MSN at 15.5. Full details on our other page.

That page also looks at how things have changed over the past few months. AOL and Ask Jeeves have both shown some interesting growth patterns.

comScore also released some limited stats about search toolbars driving queries:

• In July 2005, 11 percent of all US searches were done using toolbars, up from 8 percent the year before.  
• Yahoo had the most popular toolbar, handling 51 percent of all toolbar-based search queries.  
• Yahoo processed 282 million queries via the toolbar last month

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:52 AM | Permalink

August 17, 2005

Yahoo Virtually Tied With Google On Customer Satisfaction

I wrote earlier of wanting relevancy figures. In lieu of that, how about some customer satisfaction figures? Yahoo! Gains On Google In Customer Satisfaction from Forbes covers the latest data from the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index that puts Yahoo a hair's breath behind Google for satisfaction.

Google earned 82 out of a 100 possible satisfaction points, with Yahoo following at 80. However, Google is classified in the "search engines" category while Yahoo is classified in the "portals" category. Different questions may be involved to assess satisfaction and if so, then the scores might not be comparable.

I've looked through the ACSI site to see if the different classifications are an issue, but I've had no luck. You can check out the FAQ page and this fact sheet, as well as this commentary on the latest scores. None explain exactly what questions were asked in each category.

You can find the actual data from the ACSI here. Below is a chart that looks at scores for the various players over the past four years. Overall, Google has stayed on top but flat while competitors have generally risen, though the remain behind.

Postscript: Ask Jeeves sends a note that the testing was done before it had reduced ads on its pages, something it obviously feels will lead to an increase next time.

Postscript 2: ACSI tells me "figures are comparable across categories and that the same questions are used regardless of category," so it's fair to compare satisfaction of those in the portal category to the search category. Postscript 3: ASCI also tells me that while it can't show the actual questions asked, as these are considered proprietary, this page explains more on how things are measured and this PDF file is a sample survey for the automotive industry that gives you a general sense of what's asked.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:26 AM | Permalink

July 25, 2005

Hispanics Loving Search Sites

In a post titled: Search is HOT for U.S. Hispanics, Nacho Hernandez posts a chart (via Ad Age) that he's been "waiting to see." It lists the "Top Web Properties Among All Hispanic Users." Time-Warner tops the list. Yahoo in second. MSN third. Google fourth. Ask Jeeves seventh.

Note: If you're interested in reviewing the complete "Hispanic Fact Pack" where Nacho found the numbers, it's available here for free (52 pages; PDF).

Posted by Gary Price at 3:10 PM | Permalink

June 28, 2005

NetRatings: Google Most Popular In May, But Trend Is No Real Trends So Far

Concluding what's turned into a series of the latest search popularity ratings today (see also WebSideStory, Hitwise), new stats now posted from Nielsen//NetRatings show that ... wait for it ... Google was the most popular search engine last month, based on the percentages of searches performed there by those within the US.

No surprise. Google was tops last month, and the month before, and the month before. What's more interesting is the chart at the bottom of the NetRatings stats page I've updated. It gives you the trend for Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL since the beginning of the year and underscores why it's a bad idea to get excited over month-to-month changes.

Google's cracked the 48 percent mark! Yes, this month. But it was as low as 46 percent of all searches in February. Overall, it's stayed relatively consistent at the 47 percent range. That's the trend -- relatively consistency.

Yahoo's had little movements, with a downswing in May. Oh no! But it's tiny, and Yahoo's had upswings as well. Overall, Yahoo's "trend" is to be solid around the 21 percent mark.

MSN had all that excitement from some when it showed a boost in February. The ads are working! Microsoft is on the path to victory! Instead, the trend is that MSN has returned to the 12 percent range it had before the campaign. Trend? The temporary boost seems just that, a temporary one so far.

Meanwhile, there's AOL. It just pushed into the 5 percent range. Question is, will the next few months see this as a new level for the service, or will it slip back into 4 percent territory.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:14 PM | Permalink

Hitwise: Google Tops In May

New stats now posted from Hitwise show Google has the highest share of visits by US web surfers of all search and directory sites that Hitwise tracked in May 2005.

It's never good to depend too much on month-to-month changes, as I've written before. Nevertheless, both Yahoo and MSN will take heart that the rankings are virtually unchanged from April 2005. Here's a comparison:

Service

4/05

5/05

Change Google

37.8%

38.3%

0.5% Yahoo

18.5%

18.4%

-0.1% MSN

15.8%

15.6%

-0.3%

See the Hitwise Search Engine Ratings page within Search Engine Watch for the full top 10 list in terms of search engine popularity, including how popular image search is. Top portal front page usage is also shown.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:34 AM | Permalink

WebSideStory: Google Continues Its Popularity Rise

New stats released today from WebSideStory show Google has continued to gain in popularity every year since 2001, while Yahoo is shown to have a continual decline. MSN has had declines for the past two years.

The data shows the percentage of traffic sent to US web sites that use the WebSideStory tracking system as of the first Monday in June, going back to 2001. Google's hit an all time high this year with 52.2 percent of referrals sent.

Figures are available in chart format via this press release, and here's a graphical look at them:

The company also released figures on how Google is doing as a referral source for selected countries, as of the first Monday in June this month, June 6.

Sites in Germany are said to receive nearly all their search referral traffic from Google, while Japan has the lowest referral percentage -- though still nearly 50 percent there:

Country

Referrals Germany

91.1% Australia

80.8% UK

73.6% US

52.2% Japan

41.9%

For more information about WebSideStory and past data releases, see the WebSideStory's StatMarket Search Engine Ratings page within Search Engine Watch.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:41 AM | Permalink

June 23, 2005

Time's Top 50 Sites & Search In Class Of Its Own

Time magazine is out with their annual list of the 50 "Coolest" web sites. Instead of including resources and tools from the major search players in the Top 50, they created a "bonus section" titled, "In A Class By Themselves." So, what from Google, MSN, Yahoo, and AOL (AOL and Time magazine are owned by the same company) made the special section?

Google Google Desktop Search Gmail Picasa Google Maps Google Suggest Personalized Home Page

Yahoo Yahoo Music Yahoo MyWeb Yahoo News Yahoo Briefcase

MSN Virtual Earth* * Not publicly available until sometime this summer. It does look cool, but it seems like you'd wait until it was actually released to people before calling it that.

AOL AOL.com Portal (Note, article says that AOL.com portal will launch in July. It opened in beta yesterday) AIM Mail AOL Explorer I'm glad to see that several verticals that we mention on the SEW Blog also made the Top 50 list.

News and Information Clusty.com BlinkTV Answers.com Indeed SimplyHired Workzoo Shopping Sidestep.com Shopzilla

Posted by Gary Price at 11:37 AM | Permalink

June 17, 2005

Should You Trust Those Alexa Stats?

Everyone loves stats, and Alexa is a great place to get popularity data about your site for free. But is it accurate? If you're doing well, who cares! Actually, I do care -- and I've always felt the Alexa data was a rough guess about anything, at best. Wow My Alexa Ranking is Great! Should I Trust It? from Aaron Wall at SEO Book today takes a look at why he's dubious on them, as well.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:43 AM | Permalink

June 16, 2005

Google & Yahoo Make List of Top Growth Brands; What the Public Envisions for These Companies

Forbes and Vivaldi Partners have just published their list of the 20 brands that, "have the best extension opportunities according to consumer perceptions." eBay, Amazon.com, Google, and Yahoo all made the list.

Vivaldi Partners, a marketing consulting firm based in New York, recently put together a list of the 20 best growth brands for Forbes. They tested these brands with more than 4,500 consumers worldwide to gauge "how far each brand could extend given consumer perceptions." The survey asks consumers whether they think the brand can move into many different categories, only related product categories or has limited reach. Vivaldi then asked which specific products consumers could envision the brand offering.

Top 10:

1. Apple (Brand Value up 38% over 4 years
2. Blackberry (Brand Value up 36% over 4 years)
3. Google (Brand Value up 36% over 4 years)
4. Amazon (Brand Value up 35% over 4 years)
5. Yahoo (Brand Value up 34% over 4 years)
6. eBay (Brand Value up 31% over 4 years)
7. Red Bull (Brand Value up 31% over 4 years)
8. Starbucks (Brand Value up 25% over 4 years)
9. Pixar (Brand Value up 24% over 4 years)
10. Coach (Brand Value up 23% over 4 years)

So, what services could people see Google offering in the future to extend and expand their brand?

• Dating network
• Children's toys
• Videogames
• Instant messenger

Yes, now even the public is starting to think about a Google IM client (-: and I've read that some people use Google's recent acquisition, Dodgeball.com to help meet possible future dates. (-:

...and from Yahoo?

• Banking
• Cell Phone Services
• Coffee Houses
• Yahoo! Brand Clothing

Yahoo has announced plans to begin online banking in Japan. Perhaps, we'll be able to do Yahoo banking while sipping a latte at the Yahoo coffee house around the corner. Of course, you'll need to be seen wearing some cool Yahoo jeans and shirts. (-:

Much more in the article .

Posted by Gary Price at 4:52 PM | Permalink

June 15, 2005

Top UK Shopping Sites For May 2005

Top 10 UK shopping comparison sites from Netimperative runs down the top 10 shopping search engines for the UK market in May, as provided by Hitwise. At the top, by a wide margin, Yahoo-owned Kelkoo UK.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:11 PM | Permalink

May 17, 2005

Discussions On Travel Search

Have Search, Will Travel from MediaPost has David Berkowitz looking at travel search, the topic of three separate panels at the recent TravelCom conference. Some nice Yahoo stats on 76 percent of travel purchases being preceded by search -- and it taking six searches before a purchase is made. Some debate among a panel of newer travel search engines on how much information is too much. And a hushed room as an Avis rep downplays the need for meta travel search much less the internet: "The brand would be better off if the Intenet didn't exist." But it does, of course -- so the brand better get smart to it. Other panelists pulling in traffic from search certainly seemed to be.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:18 AM | Permalink

May 13, 2005

New Travel Search Engines Grow But Still Dwarfed By Existing Players

New travel search engines are growing in popularity, but they've got a long way to go to rival the share established players have. Hitwise: Meta Travel Engines Show Gains from MediaPost covers how stats from Hitwise show new meta travel search engines like Kayak, Farechase and Mobissimo, along with Cheapflights, have a 3 percent share of visits for those going to "travel agency" sites. Expedia, Travelocity, Orbits, Yahoo Travel and CheapTickets have a 60 percent share.

General search results from Google and Yahoo were also shown to be sending the new players lots of traffic. To me, that's not a strength. Ultimately, if a search engine has its own travel search engine (Yahoo does; Google could), it makes more sense to route people into that service rather than making them search, then sending them off elsewhere to do a search again. A Hitwise press release on the data provides more stats, include top terms driving traffic to the travel sites.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:18 AM | Permalink

April 26, 2005

The Search Landscape: The View from 30,000 Feet

A popular notion says that Google dominates the web search arena, but does it really? It depends on who you ask. The company is clearly a powerhouse, but other players are also strong, and really shine when you narrow the view to consider specific regions or countries, the preferences of particular demographic groups and other measurement factors.

In today's SearchDay article, Viewing the Search Landscape, guest writer Andrew Goodman offers his perspective on a panel at a recent Search Engine Strategies conference where representatives from the major traffic measurement agencies weighed on what's really happening out there in the world of web search.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:00 AM | Permalink

April 22, 2005

NetRatings Search Popularity Stats For March 2005 & MSN's Share

I've posted new search engine popularity statistics from NetRatings for March 2005, and you can now view a line chart showing the past three months that underscore how little has shifted in the search landscape.

It's always good to remember with these type of figures that trends typically don't emerge until several months have gone by. Case in point was all the hoopla last month, when MSN had a small 1.4 share rise from 12.8 percent in January to 14.2 percent in February.

A one month shift is nothing. You want to see a pattern grow over three, four or more months before shouting trend. Nevertheless, there was quite a bit of speculation on that one month change because of all the ad spending that MSN is now doing.

Shouldn't the service's big ad campaign have spiked it even higher? Perhaps. But perhaps the ad campaign did nothing at all, with interest actually spiked because of general press reports about MSN.

In whatever case, MSN has dipped down to 13.6 percent, with Google seeming to benefit from that loss. Panic time? Ads not working? Best to give it a few more months and wonder about other factors, before drawing too many heavy conclusions.

Here are some articles about the MSN rise from last month, with ample quotes and observations from MSN on how it plans to continue:

• MSN Gains Search Market Share from AdWeek, with the tone of how the publicity campaign seemed to have stolen traffic from Google.  
• MSN vs. Google: Major marketing effort not yet turning tide from the San Jose Business Journal, with ample MSN quotes on why they aren't disappointed that the rise wasn't bigger.  
• Microsoft Searches for a Way to Catch Up from Business 2.0, mostly positive but noting, "Of course, one month doesn't make a trend."

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:04 AM | Permalink

March 22, 2005

NetRatings Search Popularity & Loyalty Figures For Jan. 2005

I've posted new, improved search-specific stats from NetRatings painting a picture of search popularity in the US for January 2005. In the past, NetRatings didn't provide stats based on search volume, which I feel provides a better picture of which search engines are being used the most. Now those stats are available. For last January, they show what you'd probably expect. Google is in the lead, followed by Yahoo, then MSN and AOL. Check them out here: Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings. For Search Engine Watch members, I've also done a longer analysis of the figures, comparing them to some recent comScore ones. I also looked at some some interesting "crossover" or "search loyalty" statistics that NetRatings released (link to PDF file) earlier this month. That members article is here: NetRatings Search Popularity & Loyalty Figures.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:39 AM | Permalink

February 21, 2005

Pandia Gives Google, Others Top Search Honors

Previously, Gary mentioned Search Engine Watch was honored with two awards in the Pandia Search Engine Awards 2004. Here's a rundown on all the winners in each category:

• Best All Around Search Engine: Google
• Best Metasearch: ixquick
• Best Site On Searching: Search Engine Watch
• Best Site On Search Engine Marketing: Search Engine Watch
• Best Search Engine Discussion Forum: Webmaster World
• Best Publication On Searching: Web Search Garage, by Tara Calishain
• Best Publication On Search Engine Marketing: Unfair Advantage Book On Winning The Search Engine Wars, by Planet Ocean
• Best Weblog On Searching: ResourceShelf
• Best Weblog On Search Engine Marketing: Search Engine Journal
• Best Desktop Search Tool: Copernic

The Pandia article on its awards also recaps a number of runners-up and alternative resources, so it's worth a read-through to discover many other resources and tools not mentioned above.

What about our own Search Engine Watch Awards, that I mentioned would be happening earlier this year. Normally we do them in January, but it's been busy, and we're behind. The plan now is to open up the process in March, so that our readers can discuss what they liked best in 2004. More details to come on this later.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:02 PM | Permalink

February 11, 2005

Fresh comScore & NetRatings Stats Posted

I've updated the long-standing comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings and Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings pages I maintain with figures that show search engine popularity for December 2004, the latest available.

The comScore figures show Google still with the largest slice of the search pie though Yahoo is just barely behind. But Google's share is larger when you factor in the searches at AOL that it powers. Also please note that technically, MSN wasn't providing its own results that month, as shown on the provider pie. But it's better to show it that way and avoid confusion with some who will view it, given that MSN is now a provider.

The NetRatings figures give you a look at more than just the very top search engines, instead stretching to the top 15. But some of those will probably have some of you scratching your head. Information.com is more popular than Netscape Search? But note the average search time figures also shown. They indicate places people might go and stay, as opposed to wind up on somehow and depart quickly.

The NetRatings figures also don't show the entire share of search but as explain on that page simply reflect "audience reach," whether someone simply did even one search at the search engine in a given month.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:52 PM | Permalink

January 27, 2005

More Search Survey Results

It's a busy week for searcher surveys. The Daily Rundown's Sid Yadav has just posted the results of his NextSearchSurvey. It's easy to see that many of the people who took the survey were advanced searchers after reviewing the large number of respondents who know what a Boolean query is and utilize advanced search features. Yadav offers a few comments about the results here.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:31 AM | Permalink

January 25, 2005

Ansearch Surges in Popularity

According to new numbers from Hitwise, the new Australian search engine, Ansearch (see our October post: New Web Search Engine From Australia Coming Next) is growing very quickly.

...Ansearch's popularity surged by 2000 percent shortly after its launch and its market share seems to have continued increasing after the Christmas holidays. Hitwise said that Ansearch debuted as the 120th most popular Australian search engine and by the end of December had shot up to 37th most popular. According to weekly data provided by Hitwise, Ansearch is now the 27th most popular Australian site in its category.

More in the article: Australian search engine flies up the rankings.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:56 AM | Permalink

January 24, 2005

OneStat Says Google Stays On Top In Global Search

Visitor tracking service OneStat says Google remains the search engine sending the most users to sites making use of its measuring service. On average over the last two months, traffic the top four search engines is reported as follows:

• Google: 57.2%
• Yahoo: 21.3
• MSN Search: 8.6%
• AOL Search: 3.5%

Google was said to have increased its traffic a tiny 0.8 percent from eight months ago. Working off figures from this prior release, here's a full rundown on gains and losses:

• Google: +0.8%
• Yahoo: +0.2%
• AOL Search -0.3%
• MSN Search -0.6%

For a rundown of similar releases from OneStat, see the company's press release page and this page from Search Engine Watch.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:05 AM | Permalink

January 5, 2005

Survey Says: Google Workers Use Google 100 Percent!

In What Search Engines Do Search Engine Companies Use?, Nathan at InsideGoogle provides stats from Visitorville Intelligence showing what top search engines are used by those who work at particular search engines after being tipped to the service by Google Blogoscoped. Those at Google apparently use Google 100 percent of the time. Those at Yahoo use Yahoo 69 percent of the time, followed by Google 30 percent of the time.

Visitorville collects the information by mining referer data provided by those who use its web analytics service. That's similar to what WebSideStory's StatMarket has long done. Some background on search related releases from that company can be found here.

The problem with mining referer information is that it can be skewed by the sites actually involved. There's no guarantee that the sample using Visitorville reflects the sample from across the web. And frankly, the idea that 100 percent of Google employees use Google leaves me wondering about the data. I mean, 99 percent, sure -- but a pure 100 percent?

Nevertheless, you can have fun playing around looking at stats for companies via the Visitorville Intelligence site itself. Other interesting stats are things like Most Fanatical Users Of Google, which shows those on Comcast Cable using it the most. That doesn't mean Comcast employees use Google the most, of course -- but more likely that those accessing the web through Comcast are big Google users.

Want to discuss? We've got a forum thread going here: Should Yahoo employees search elsewhere?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:11 AM | Permalink

December 30, 2004

Traffic to Charity Sites Jumps

Hitwise reports that traffic to humanitarian websites has grown over five-fold since the tsunami disaster December 26, with the sector now representing 0.29% of all visits made online.

The UK's Disaster Emergency Committee, an umbrella organization which coordinates the UK's national appeal for humanitarian crises overseas, is the most visited Charity website. In fact, so many people are attempting to visit the site that the organization is asking people to call a toll-free number to donate.

A previously unranked blog site, tsunamihelp.blogspot.com, jumped to the number 10 spot this week.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:53 AM | Permalink

December 9, 2004

Forrester Stats, Search Defection & Vertical Search

Charlene Li shares some stats from internal Forrester research about search loyalty in The battle for search loyalty drives innovation. Is Google facing defections? Will vertical search wipe out the big boys? Those are the suggestions, but things aren't that simple.

A key finding is that Google has a lead among consumers who regularly use its tools, but these consumers also frequently use other tools as well. The suggestion is that this leaves the door open for "defection."

Yep -- and that's always been the case. We've long had reports that consumers use multiple search services. But the classic AltaVista to Google defection example shows that defection tends to happen not just because another tool is better but also because the existing tool is bad.

In other words, my view is that it's not that MSN needs to be "good enough" to get people from Google or even "better than Google" to gain defectors. People will only kick the Google habit if they feel Google is getting worse.

If Google itself continues to be "good enough," helping consumers find what they are looking for most of the time, I don't think you'll see big defections happen. In fact, if AltaVista had continued to be "good enough," Google might never have been able to emerge as the powerhouse it is today. But AltaVista wasn't good enough -- it had gotten bad.

Notable from the report is the fact that despite the threats to Google, it continues to lead among consumers while Yahoo is said to have lost some share of searchers this year compared to last.

There's also a finding that the major search engines will "cede ground" to "search specialists." Sure, that will happen. If there's a good vertical search tool, people will learn to go to it. Heck, consider the people who already head directly Amazon to buy a book. They've learned it provides answers they need, so there's no need to search the web (My past article, Avoiding The Search Gap, looks at this type of behavior more).

So the threat is there -- but also is the reality that if a great vertical pops up, it's likely the major search engines will buy into the space or develop their own:

• Yahoo recently bought FareChase to build up its travel specialty.  
• AOL bought Singingfish last year to have multimedia search in house (and recently relaunched the service.)  
• Google's Froogle shopping search engine is one of the few products the company deliberately created internally to focus on that vertical area, rather than letting it develop naturally out of engineering interests as with Google News.

Forrester's stats also found:

• MSN gained users who have it as their home page and has a lead in toolbar usage, which is either pretty odd or amazing given the toolbar was only released earlier this year. Forrester also found that half of all toolbar users use another toolbar, as well.  
• Many loyal Google users still have Yahoo or MSN as their home pages. No doubt, this is in part because Google's stealth portal features aren't fully exposed. The general population can't have a Gmail account yet, for example -- so there's no reason for some to start out at Google as part of the daily "check my email" experience. Google still doesn't offer things like stock portfolios, as well. Google News is probably the company's most "sticky" service in terms of where people might start out.  
• Google was tops for "search effectiveness" but overall quality was said to be "poor," which is why consumers are said by Forrester to use multiple search engines. I really can't comment more about this apparent weakness without a lot more detail of why search effectiveness is deemed different from quality. That's not given in the summary release.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:28 AM | Permalink

November 10, 2004

Popularity Doesn't Always Equal Usefulness (or Importance) of a Search Tool

Some numbers from Hitwise were released the other day about the traffic smaller web engines tools have been getting some press attention.

The actual numbers aren't a big surprise. Far from it.

Collectively, five alternative search engines -- Vivisimo.com, Clusty.com, a9.com, Alltheweb.com and Snap.com -- claimed only one-tenth of a percent of total visits to search engines and directories during that week, Hitwise found.

AllTheWeb gets little attention these days. Yahoo currently uses it as a testbed for algorithm changes and its own web database and many of its powerful advanced search features went away several months ago.

Clusty and Snap had launched just a few weeks before the sample was taken. Perhaps an issue but it's not worth dwelling on.

I was happy to see the Hitwise VP of Research say:

The market share of these search sites might be small, but it's important to note that Google itself was in such a position not too many years ago...The challenge for smaller players that want to become mainstream search portals is to gain mindshare and ultimately deliver the most relevant search results.

First, he's on target with these points. His comments about Google having a small market share just a few years ago will keep the developers developing. However,gaining mindshare might be just as big of a challenge these days. In this arena, Google is just so damn good.

Second, when it comes to general web engines like Google and Yahoo it's important to have a variety of crawls and relevancy algorithms out there. Danny has referred to this as unique "voices." Jux2 clearly illustrates that search engine overlap isn't as great as many would think. Snap.com is using the Gigablast database. Ask Jeeves/Teoma have their own crawl and MSN is currently previewing their own database. When you add in Google and Yahoo that's five large web indexes. The more the better!

Finally, from the searcher perspective, let's don't focus on the numbers. Because a general web engine or a vertical doesn't receive the traffic (or attention) that Google or Yahoo get, doesn't mean the resources (the ones with less traffic) aren't worthy usage. The search tools mentioned in the survey and MANY others not only offer search capabilities that the two big guys don't offer (clustering and metasearch from Clusty, dynamic search refinement from Snap.com) but can also allow the searcher to access a smaller, more "focused" portion of the web and potentially receive more precise results in a simple and prompt manner. As general web engines grow larger and with typical searcher habits not changing much, searchers will find focused, specialized, and niche tools even more useful.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 8, 2004

Top Coders Say Google Is Tops

TopCoder.com polled its 44,000 members worldwide about their favorite search engine. A much smaller number actually voted, 450, and they really like Google. It gained 92 percent of the vote, followed by Yahoo at 3 percent.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 24, 2004

Search Fuels Music Retailer Traffic

Why would Yahoo buy Musicmatch? Why might Google be looking at music search? Hitwise found 30 percent of those who went to a music retail site in July came via search engines. Traffic also had risen 49 percent since 2003. Music search means the search engines themselves could better tap into that traffic. More details here from InternetWeek: Search Traffic On The Rise For Online Music Retailers.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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