The “slashtags” search engine has already seen a 337 percent gain in unique visitors this year. That’s as of yesterday (Monday) afternoon, and there are still two weeks left in the month.

Blekko shared the chart below from its internal analytics, showing a gain in unique IPs visiting the site from 1.58 million in December to 5.33 million so far in April.

Blekko saw visits from 3.71 million unique IPs in March, the most recent full-month count that’s available. That’s a 645 percent spike compared to March 2011.

On the Blekko blog yesterday, CEO Rich Skrenta posted traffic charts from Experian Hitwise and Compete, both of which also show dramatic traffic increases in recent weeks (Hitwise) and months (Compete).

For the sake of completeness, we asked comScore if it’s also seeing the same trend for Blekko. Although the numbers are different, the trend is pretty much exactly the same — a dramatic rise in traffic beginning in January, 2012. (ComScore’s unique visitor count for March is a little less than half of the unique IP count on Blekko’s internal chart above, but comScore is counting U.S.-only visits.)

According to comScore’s numbers, Blekko is now getting about triple the traffic of fellow underdog search engine DuckDuckGo, which has also seen big gains of its own in user activity.

Why Is Blekko Growing So Quickly?

Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta tells us via email that he thinks there are a handful of reasons for Blekko’s traffic spike this year:

1. Improved index quality. Days before Christmas, Blekko announced a “major upgrade” that included a bigger index that improved its long-tail search results.
2. Dissatisfaction with Google.
3. Distribution partnerships. Skrenta is referring things like Blekko’s recent deal with security software maker Lavasoft.
4. Trade show and convention appearances. Blekko has been visible at numerous recent events, from shows like SXSW, Blogworld Expo and our own SMX West conference to many librarian-focused events like the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting and the Internet Librarian Conference.
5. The demise of Yahoo Site Explorer. Since Yahoo Site Explorer closed last November, Skrenta says SEOs have been “all over” Blekko’s SEO tools and data.

Google continues to have a near death-grip on search engine market share in the U.S., but the growth that Blekko — and DuckDuckGo, too — is seeing in recent months means that at least some searchers like to keep their options open. (And, much like the rumors of a Facebook search engine, the growth of Blekko and other search engines is also a Good Thing for Google as it deals with antitrust/monopoly concerns.)

Here’s our earlier coverage of the survey:

• Pew Report: 65% View Personalized Search As Bad; 73% See It As Privacy Invasion
• Pew Survey: 68% View Targeted Ads Negatively; 59% Have Noticed Targeting

To recap the basic findings, Pew reported that search usage was highly popular and essentially tied with email as the most common online activity — and still quite a bit more popular than social networking according to these findings.

Google’s US market share is just over 66 percent according to the most recent comScore data. However when asked which search engine they used most often, 83 percent of Pew respondents said Google.

The upbeat survey findings took an abruptly negative turn when Pew started asking people about search personalization and data mining. Two-thirds (65 percent) of users said search personalization was a “bad thing.” Nearly three-fourths (73 percent) said that data mining for the purpose of personalizing search results was “not okay.”

What’s fascinating here is that the public, at least in terms of these survey findings, doesn’t seem to be associating Google with any of the “not okay” things they don’t like about personalization and ad targeting. In fact there seems to be a complete disconnect between survey respondents’ positive views of search, and by extension Google, and disapproval of personalization and data mining.

Pew didn’t insert Google’s (or Bing’s) names into the questions about personalization or data mining to see if these activities would harm brand perception and usage. Pew simply asked about data mining in the abstract. However it would have been very interesting to see the answers to those more specific questions.

Google has met with intensifying criticism in the recent past over several privacy related incidents and missteps (e.g., Cookiegate, privacy policy changes). But the general US public seems not to have noticed. Google is probably assuming that any furor over SPYW and privacy will simply blow over and it won’t suffer any brand or image “penalty” or consumer defections to Bing. That may be a correct assumption — although the issue of online privacy is not going away any time soon.

My guess is that Google will generally ignore the Pew survey findings (though legislators probably won’t) and continue, full speed ahead, on its present personalization course.

Related Entries

• Pew Report: 65% View Personalized Search As Bad; 73% See It As Privacy Invasion
• Pew Survey: 68% View Targeted Ads Negatively; 59% Have Noticed Targeting
• Cookiegate Another Privacy Black Eye For Google
• Google Didn’t “Track” iPhones, But It Did Bypass Safari’s Privacy Settings
• Google’s SPYW, Kenya Imbroglios An “Ink Blot” Test For Google As Good Or Evil
• Google Now Forcing All New Users To Create Google+ Enabled Accounts
• 36 State Attorneys General Call For Privacy Meeting With Google
• Apple, Google In Privacy Hot Water Over “Locationgate”
• Google’s New Terms Of Service & Privacy Policy: Anything You Do May Be Used To Target You?
• Europeans, EPIC Bring More Scrutiny To Google Privacy Changes
• No, You Don’t Need To Fear The Google Privacy Changes: A Reality CheckSurv

In this article I want to focus on a single finding: 49 percent of smartphone and tablet owners are using apps to find local information. On one level this is unremarkable and makes sense; apps are popular and there are lots of apps that use location in one way or another.

We know from Google that 40 percent of browser-based mobile search has a local or offline intent. That already represents significant query volume. But what if half of the local search query volume on mobile devices (and tablets) goes through apps?

That’s not exactly what the survey data show, but it’s a very logical and plausible inference.

We don’t know the total volume of app-based search or local search because nobody is tracking that right now in the same way that PC query volume is tracked. Yet if half of mobile users in the US (including tablets for this discussion) use apps for local lookups and research it stands to reason that perhaps half their queries go through apps vs the browser (read: Google).

Source: comScore, Localeze, 15 Miles

The absolute volume of local-mobile queries could be greater in apps than the browser. This is because smartphone and tablet users (in particular) are typically more active and engaged than PC users as a general matter. The chart above shows that tablet owners conduct (on a percentage basis) more daily and weekly local searches than smartphone and PC owners.

This is “informed speculation” on my part, but I would imagine that if half of mobile consumers are using apps for local search then at least half of local search query volume is happening inside those apps. In terms of which apps smartphone and tablet owners are using for local searches and lookups, comScore found the following:

Source: comScore, Localeze, 15 Miles

My understanding is that this question involved a predetermined list of choices so it does not reflect all apps being used by consumers for local search. For example, 20 million people are using Foursquare but it’s not represented here (unless reflected in “other”).

The top app being used for local search is Google Maps according to the study. However, Yahoo, Mapquest, Bing and others are not that far behind and apparently in a more competitive position vs. their relative positions in search on the PC. Indeed, there are some very interesting implications for Google if Google Maps were to be replaced by an Apple mapping product at some point.

First, the traffic stats:

Experian Hitwise tells us that downstream traffic from msnNOW to Bing jumped 21 percent between the first and second weeks since msnNOW’s launch on February 15th.

That’s in line with a separate report from Compete that says 23 percent of msnNOW users that didn’t visit Bing in the week before launch did visit Bing after using msnNOW. Compete says the largest group of new or re-engaged Bing users are in the 25-34 age group.

msnNOW, if you’re not familiar with it, is a editor-curated site that reports the day’s hot/trending news by tracking the hottest topics that “people are talking about, searching for, and sharing the most” on Facebook, Twitter, Bing and Breakingnews.com (which is an independent unit inside Microsoft’s MSNBC.com service).

One reason it’s driving more traffic to Bing is that, in some of its story coverage, it includes links to get more information via Bing searches. Here’s an example:

This story about the car that Kanye West and Jay-Z used in a music video was on the msnNOW home page last night. Users that clicked-thru got a brief summary of the story (shown above). And that link in the first sentence for the video sends users to watch the video on Bing Videos — ergo, more traffic to Bing.

But Is That Real Search Activity?

Bing may be seeing more traffic thanks to msnNOW, but there’s an issue that will likely come up in the future when we talk about search engine market share. The URL of the msnNOW link is essentially a Bing search URL:

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=otis+jay-z+kanye+west&view=detail&mid=1CC2ECE9019B6F298AD91CC2ECE9019B6F298AD9&first=0&FORM=LKVR1

So, even though a user is clicking from one site to watch a video on Bing, it looks like a search was conducted. That’s similar to how both Yahoo and Bing have used slideshows as searches to artificially inflate their share of overall search activity. That practice eventually prompted comScore to separate its tracking into “core search” and “explicit core search.” The latter doesn’t include activity like slideshows and, presumably, video plays (like shown above) as searches.

To be fair, links like the above aren’t the only way msnNOW users are able to access Bing. Every page on msnNOW, including the home page, has a very noticeable Bing search box at the top.

We may get a better picture of msnNOW’s impact on Bing’s search volume when the next set of statistics comes out, which should be in a couple weeks. Whether the increased traffic from msnNOW equates to Bing gaining in search market share, it is at least getting people onto Bing — the first step toward converting them into actual Bing users.

It was just about three weeks ago that we wrote about the search engine setting its own record with 731,000 searches in a single day. To go from that to more than a million in a few weeks is impressive.

Via a tweet yesterday, DuckDuckGo announced that it had its first day with a million direct searches.

We received over 1,000,000 direct searches yesterday for the first time ever!duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

— duckduckgo (@duckduckgo) February 14, 2012

The milestone happened on February 13th when DuckDuckGo had 1,067,006 direct searches, according to its public traffic page.

Another way to look at the growth: A year ago, on February 13, 2011, DuckDuckGo reported having 176,000 direct searches. It had its first day with 500,000 searches on November 28, 2011.

Google gained share vs. last month. However, the big news is that Bing is now firmly ahead of Yahoo in “explicit core search.” But using comScore’s expanded “total core search” definition Yahoo remains ahead of Bing.

Below are the official numbers; first explicit core search (no slideshows) and then total core search (including so-called “contextual search”):

Yahoo and Bing have now effectively changed places. Bing has taken share from Yahoo, while Google has been largely unaffected. Accordingly, the “search alliance” share of queries remains essentially flat at 29 percent.

The figures come from Net Applications, which says it tracks about 160 million unique visits per month to a worldwide network of more than 40,000 sites.

According to Net Applications, Firefox and Safari also saw market share losses in January. While they were declining, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer gained 1.09%, its biggest monthly gain in at least two years.

One possible explanation is that a lot of people bought new PC computers over the holidays, and Internet Explorer’s market share grew in January because it’s the default browser there. But that didn’t happen a year ago; in January 2011, Explorer’s market share declined nearly a full percent. (IE did gain in February, 2011, as shown above.)

Net Applications ties Explorer’s gain and Chrome’s decline to the Google penalty which removed Chrome from search results for a number of browser-related search terms. Google penalized Chrome in early January after the company’s own botched sponsored blog post campaign ran afoul of Google’s search/webmaster guidelines.

In my searches this morning, the main Chrome page doesn’t appear on page one for “browser,” “web browser,” “download web browser,” “chrome,” “google chrome” nor “chrome browser.” I’m not sure that’s why Chrome’s market share dropped in January, but it’s an interesting theory to consider at minimum.

(tip via Computerworld)

Mittlerweile benutzen fast 10 Millionen Nutzer in Deutschland regelmäßig Bing, das sind 20 Prozent der aktiven Internetnutzer hierzulande.

According to several third-party sources, Bing’s market share is smaller than the 20 percent figure cited above. For example, the following is StatCounter’s search engine data for Germany:

Source: StatCounter

NetMarketshare generally agrees, showing Bing’s PC search share at just over 2 percent.

The combined Bing-Yahoo “search alliance” share in the US is about 30 percent. However the search alliance has considerably less reach in Europe. While the organic-results merger was completed last year, Microsoft adCenter is just now rolling out in Europe.

Related Entries

• Search Alliance Begins First AdCenter Testing In Europe
• December “Explicit” Search Numbers: Bing Now Ahead Of Yahoo
• Report: Google Controls 44 Percent Of Global Online Advertising
• Bing, Yahoo Now Neck & Neck In US Search Market Share

First, let’s recognize how cool it is that DuckDuckGo actually has a public web page that shows the search engine’s traffic and query activity. We learned about it via a DuckDuckGo tweet today; you can see for yourself at duckduckgo.com/traffic.html.

The chart is impressive and shows the monthly moving averages of direct queries on DuckDuckGo’s website. Down below the chart are the numbers that show the search engine had 731,472 direct queries on January 24th — a new record, breaking the record that had been set a day earlier. Those were the first two times that DuckDuckGo had reached 700,000+ queries in a day.

The growth is impressive and good for the search industry, but the latest search engine stats from comScore provide a reality check.

ComScore says there were 18.2 billion explicit core searches in the U.S. in December. Some quick math indicates, then, that DuckDuckGo’s query volume is about 0.00004 of overall search activity — or about one in every 25,000 searches. Scratch that for inaccuracy (due to comparing a daily DuckDuckGo number to a monthly comScore figure). If the comScore number is converted to daily queries, as it should be, then DuckDuckGo’s query volume is actually about 0.1 percent of overall search activity, or about one of every 1,000 queries — much more than I originally suggested. (This is why I avoided math at all costs in college.)

So again, props to DuckDuckGo on the new records and for even showing query data to the public at all. (Wouldn’t it be great if Google and Bing did the same?) But wow … still such a long, long way to go.

IgnitionOne said that among its retail clients, “Mobile search [  ] accounted for 24% of retailers’ total paid search budgets on Black Friday, compared to 14.2% of the total during all of Q4. This represents enormous growth compared to Q4 2010, when mobile search spend accounted for only 5.2% of total retail paid search spend.”

The following chart from IgnitionOne shows the growth of mobile impressions, clicks and search ad spend vs. 2010.

The Marin Software report says the company is seeing increased adoption of mobile and tablet advertising among its clients. More significantly, however, its clients’ campaigns on mobile are “showing significantly better performance than similar campaigns on desktop computers.”

Marin published comparisons for its aggregated search campaigns across PC and mobile. As the chart below indicates, paid search ads on smartphones and tablets outperformed those on the PC in terms of CTRs.