Get RSS feed
2.8 Billion Searches Conducted on Google in May
Nielsen/NetRatings just released its May marketshare figures for the search market. According to Nielsen, Google pulled in just a little over 49% of last month's searches (down from 49.8% the previous month), or roughly 2.8 billion queries. Yahoo followed with a 22.9% share and 1.3 billion searches. MSN Search, with 600 million searches, lagged in third place with 10.6%.
Total number of searches, however, was up dramatically for all of the top search engines. Yahoo, for example, handled 34% more queries than it did 12 months ago and says the battle for search industry dominance is just getting started. "We're three steps into a marathon," according to Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz, the company's vice president of product strategy.
Labels: data
Posted by Melanie Phung
MSN Has Self-Esteem Issues
MSN is second-best, even in its own eyes, according to a hilarious post by Philipp Klöckner, in which he sets out to prove, successfully, that MSN Search results are so easily manipulated that anyone can outrank the MSN site search.msn.de on a search for the term search.msn.de.
Source: Philipp Lenssen's Google Blogoscoped
Posted by Melanie Phung
Random Stats
There are now more web documents online than there are people on the planet.
Americans keep their computers on 9.2 hours a day, TVs on 8.9 hours a day, says the Harrison Group says. (I, of course, keep my computer on 24 hours a day -- but that doesn't mean I'm actually on it that much. Usually when my TV is on, I'm actually watching it.)
Rosner Research says that 30% of 18-24-year-olds worry about getting harassed or stalked online. Meanwhile, 78% of young people have a personal web site or blog. (And 85% of people 25 and older are sad to learn that they are no longer considered "young people.")
HitWise said recently that Google sends about 1% of its traffic to eBay. In turn, 2.7% of Google's traffic originated on eBay.
According to the Newspaper Association of America, advertising on newspaper web sites rose nearly 35% in Q1 2006 from Q1 2005, while print ad revenue rose 0.3%.
Bill Tancer of HitWise postulated that general keyword searches in the main index make up about 80% of all Google traffic, followed by image search at just under 10%.
Some other interesting stats on ZDNet's IT Facts blog.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Can an Embedded Blogger Stay Objective?
Oh my. Apparently the entertainment industry has embedded bloggers now. Let's just hope these embedded bloggers don't give away any information that could harm this country's most important economic product, lest we play right into the hands of those anti-U.S.-cultural-domination zealots. Now if I could only make myself care.
Labels: blogging
Posted by Melanie Phung
Large Companies Neglecting WoM Marketing
According to consulting firm McKinsey, about two-thirds of all economic activity in the United States is influenced by shared opinions about a product, brand or service. And on the Internet those shared opinions are reaching more eyes and ears than ever before.
"More than 90% of large companies believe that consumer recommendations are important in influencing other consumers' purchase decisions," said Emily Riley, a JupiterResearch analyst. "Yet many large companies are not focusing efforts on managing the conversation among consumers." Of small companies, 66% monitor word-of-mouth (WoM) on a regular basis, with large companies only doing so 33% of the time.
Jupiter says large companies, if they are following word-of-mouth, "are more likely to assign WoM management to PR and marketing groups or third-party agencies, a practice that largely insulates employees from the affects, both positive and negative, of the feedback and means missing key opportunities."
Obviously monitoring word-of-mouth alone isn't going to be very effective in the long run. Instead, companies need to actually be able to shape and influence those discussions.
A conference starting tomorrow -- Word of Mouth Basic Training (WOMBAT) organized by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) -- addresses this topic in more depth.
Which brings me to a subject I want to blog about in the future: Astroturfing.
Labels: search marketing
Posted by Melanie Phung
Folksonomy Spam, a.k.a. Tag Spam
For every evolution of the Internet, new types of spam are born. Wikipedia even has a whole article series about different kinds of spam. If you aren't familiar with tagging and the ways it can be abused, learn a little about tag spam here and see a somewhat amusing example here.
Labels: social media, spam
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google Grouping Made Room for Three
I'm seeing more Google weirdness: the other day, I was doing a vanity search on Google the other day and noticed that there were three results from this blog on the first page.
This is unusual because Google will ordinarily only display 2 results from the same domain on a single search results page, and group them together. It will display the higher ranking page according to where it fits algorithmically and display the next ranked page from that site indented underneath the first.
So if you have pages that independently would rank #1 and #7, Google will display them as #1 and an indented #2. If you have pages that alone would rank #2, #3 and #10, Google's search engine results page will only display #2 and #3 (indented), giving the #10 spot to the next result that is not on your domain.
For searchers this is useful because you don't need to skim hundreds of listings from the same site. It's significant for SEO because it means you will always need multiple domains if you're tracking to dominate the entire first page of results for a given search -- any one domain will yield at most 2 positions.
(Each results page does this independently, so if you have spots #10, #11 and #12, you'll still see your best listing in the #10 spot, with #11 at the top of the second page and #12 indented below, leaving opportunities to gain more spots on subsequent pages -- assuming a standard results display setting of 10 results per page. If the user has Google set to display 100 results, however, then you're limited to a total of 2 spots in the top 100 positions.)
I've seen multiple indented listings from the supplemental index, but never the main search results. If, however, this wasn't just some flukey thing and Google is thinking of displaying more than two sites per domain per results page, that could impact an SEO strategy that relies on multiple pages from multiple sites being optimized for the same keyword. Even if the new limit were 3 instead of 2, that means in theory you could dominate the entire first page using only 4 domains instead of the 5 separate domains currently needed. You would still need to optimize 10 pages total, but 10 pages on 4 domains might be easier to optimize than 10 pages from 5 domains. Might be. Might not. Either way, that would be an impressive feat.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
Google at Nearly 60% Marketshare
Hitwise released search engine marketshare figures for the month of May: Google reeled in 59.3% of all searchers for the four-week period. Yahoo took 22% of search queries, while 12.1% of searches were conducted using MSN Search. These numbers refer to U.S. search activity.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Pew Internet Project: Broadband Is Mainstream
Let's catch up on news from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. According to their latest studies, home broadband adoption has become mainstream:
- Internet penetration has now reached 73% for all American adults. At the end of March 2006, 42% of Americans had high-speed at home, 40% increase over last year.
- About 60 million Americans say that the Internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years (what votes to cast for American Idol, for example)1
- By the end of 2005, 50 million Americans got news online on a typical day, a sizable increase since 2002 (which is also the year American Idol premiered). For a group of "high-powered" online users -- early adopters of home broadband who are the heaviest Internet users -- the Internet is their primary news source on the average day.
- And 48 million Americans -- mostly those with high-speed at home -- have posted content to the Internet.
- Overall, 35% of all Internet users have posted one or more of four types of content to the Internet: having one's own blog; having one's own webpage; working on a blog or webpage for work or a group; or sharing self-created content such as a story, artwork, or video.2
- An even higher percentage of home broadband users -- 42% or about 31 million people -- have posted content to the Internet. They account for 73% of home Internet users who were the source of online content.
- Sharing a variety of creations online is among the most popular kinds of user-generated content. Overall, 36 million Internet users have shared their own artwork, photos, stories, or videos on the internet. That comes to 26% of Internet users. Home broadband users account for about two-thirds of this number.
fn2. And let's not forget profiles on online dating sites. According to Pew: "Some 11% of all Internet users and 37% of those who are single and looking say they have gone to dating websites."
Labels: data
Posted by Melanie Phung
New Design: OMG Not Enough Ponies
I changed the look of my blog. And by "I," of course, I mean someone else. And by "changed the look," I mean, finally got rid of the crappy slightly-tweaked-but-still-obviously-a-Blogger-template template. Still not enough ponies, but much better from a readability point of view, no?
Other Design News and No-Longer News
One of the major things that sets Google apart from its portal competitors Yahoo and MSN (besides superior search results, perceived or real) is the sparseness of the Google homepage. Rightly or wrongly, people think of it as "just a simple search box on an otherwise blank screen. No extraneous information or links, no clutter, just the one thing Google does: search." That's one of the things that's come to define Google.
So imagine my surprise when I went to the Google homepage and found news, weather and movie information. Google.com was defaulting to my personalized Google page even though, I swear, I had never clicked on the "Personalized Home" link or did anything which would have affected my preferences. In fact, I'd never even seen my personalized page. So what's up with that? Was this one of Google's user interface tests? Am I hallucinating?
Last month, Yahoo updated its homepage design, and somewhat more newish to Yahoo is the incorporation of Yahoo Answers into the main search results, prominently displayed on the upper right of the results page.
And just yesterday, Yahoo released a new design for MyWeb, emphasizing social/taggy/Web 2.0ish shtuff. (Oh, and btw: Yahoo rolled out an update to its index last week, which I wasn't able to blog about.)
Okay, that's enough non sequiturs for today. Hope you like the new design.
Labels: navel-gazing
Posted by Melanie Phung
Blogger Is t3h Suck This Week
I just needed to vent. What is UP with Blogger these last few days? If you can get anything to load at all, odds are that none of it actually works. I'm trying to update the blog with lots of great Pulitzer-worthy stuff that will make you want to come back every day, I truly am, but Blogger won't let me. I'd consider migrating over to TypePad or something, but that would mean having to rebuild the template, which, you may have noticed, was just rebuilt for your viewing and usability pleasure.
Posted by Melanie Phung
Dude, Google's Got Dell
According to Ben Charny of eWeek's Google Watch column:
Recent comments by Google execs make it clear that Google views Dell Computers as its secret weapon against chief nemesis Microsoft.
In fact, there's lots of evidence pointing to an important nexis between Google's recently rebuffed anti-trust allegations about a new Microsoft Web browser and the three-year-long deal Google recently reached with Dell Computers.
The Dell deal will help Google counter Microsoft's built-in advantage (of having it's own browser) by making Google the first thing seen by tens of millions of new Dell users. With the partnership, Google gets the same, if not a better, advantage without actually having to go out and build a competitor to Internet Explorer.
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung
KinderStart Suit a Non-Starter
KinderStart, the company that sued Google for deindexing its website and is trying to get others to join it in a class action, is getting its day in court.
Oh, how ridiculous is this, let me count the ways. Let's just overlook the hyperbole and melodrama of the copywriting, and skip right over to:In advance of the hearing scheduled for June 30, KinderStart put out this very funny press release:
For background:
Labels: Google
Posted by Melanie Phung