People love lists. Publishers love lists too because they sell copies of traditional print newspapers and magazines and, online, they generate lots of clicks and page views. For example, the HuffingtonPost has become a veritable archive of slideshows: "the 10 best places to live," the "hottest beach bods of the summer" and so on. US News sells lots copies of its infamous "Best Colleges & Universities" issue. The more venerable but no less cynical Forbes' "Richest People in America" is in the same vein. So without further ado . . . the envelope please (thanks Gary Price). Here are the Ri [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: General | Stats: Size

How can Nielsen say Bing has overtaken Yahoo while comScore reports that Yahoo grew and leads Bing by more than 6 points? Someone is right and someone is wrong. Here is the Nielsen data from earlier this week, showing Microsoft/Bing overtaking Yahoo: And here is the August comScore data (reported by Citibank): Google: 65.4% (down from 65.8% in July) Yahoo: 17.4% (vs. 17.1% in July) Bing 11.1% (vs. 11% in July) The comScore data show Bing as flat, not growing. The combined share of Bing and Yahoo is 28.5%. Among the firms that track search market share Nielsen is the ou [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: comScore | Stats: General | Stats: NetRatings | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Size

Yesterday morning Citi analyst Mark Mahaney put out a research note with comScore data that showed Facebook had passed Google in terms of time spent online. Mahaney observed: Looking at % of Total Time Spent by the top 5 sites in August, Facebook, for the first time took the top spot with 41.1B minutes followed by Google with 39.8B minutes. Yahoo! fell to the 3rd spot with 37.7B minutes. Also, Yahoo!’s share of time spent in Q3 QTD slid to an all-time low of 9.3%. On a separate note, Google’s management noted that its number of global users crossed the 1B mark for the first time. Med [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Facebook | Google: Business Issues | Stats: comScore | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Size

Much like search marketers may salivate over some new piece of inside SEO info that Matt Cutts (or someone else at Google) shares, some book lovers seem to be fairly excited over an Inside Google Books blog post yesterday that answers the question, How many books are there in the world? The answer: 129,864,880 books. Google is, of course, in the process of digitizing many of the world's books, defending itself in lawsuits related to the scanning, and waiting for a judge's decision about its proposed settlement in a separate lawsuit. If you're really into books, Google's blog post gets [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Google: Book Search | Stats: General | Stats: Size

Danny wrote about the latest comScore search share numbers and what they might mean. Have Yahoo and Bing genuinely gained share or has it been gamed or rigged with tricks? Has Google lost share? Danny argued that Google's share might have slipped slightly but that overall query volume had risen so the share numbers don't tell the whole story. Ad network Chitika took a look at the question from the perspective of its network and came to the conclusion that the Yahoo and Bing share gains are not just the result of tricks or slide-show manipulation: [W]e thought we’d take a look at our own [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: comScore | Stats: General | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Size

The truth of most forecasts lies not in their numeric precision but in their direction and trajectory. For years consumer time with the internet has not brought commensurate ad dollars to the medium. The recession, grudging recognition of consumer behavior and years of evangelizing finally appears to be changing all that. Metrics aggregator eMarketer is forecasting "double-digit" growth for online advertising. The firm sees the paid search market growing almost 16 percent this year to just over $12 billion. The lion's share of that, of course, will go to Google. Online video advertising, ho [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: Size | Stats: Spend Projections

comScore released its October 2009 search share numbers and Google has passed 65% search market share, holding 65.4% share in October, up 0.5% from the previous month. comScore also claims that Microsoft Bing also gained 0.5% share, reaching 9.9%, while Yahoo dropped 0.8% to 18.0% from the previous month. Nielsen also released its October 2009 stats, showing Google has a 66.1% share, Yahoo has a 15.4% and Microsoft Bing has a 9.7% share. I was unable to find Nielsen's September report (did they publish one?) but I did find their August report which showed Bing had 10.7% share. In this ca [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: comScore | Stats: General | Stats: Size

We received some interesting data from search agency iCrossing yesterday. The data show US search market share percentages and distribution quite different than the major traffic metrics firms. The company says its numbers are "based on a large representative sample of Fortune 1000 companies, across all major verticals," which use its search tracking tools. Accordingly the iCrossing data show US September natural search market share to be the following: Google 76.7 percent Bing (increasingly slightly from Aug to) 8.2 percent Yahoo (decreasing to) 11.1 percent AOL and Ask show "pre [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Stats: comScore | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Size | Top News

Yesterday comScore reported search numbers for August. What they show is growth in overall search volume, including at Google sites (except YouTube). Google has 2.5 times the search volume as Yahoo and Microsoft combined. But Microsoft's Bing also grew its share of the overall US search market from 8.9 percent in July to 9.3 percent in August. Here are the charts: In the "expanded view" of search, what stands out are the following: Search volume declines at eBay, AOL and MySpace Growth at Bing/Microsoft and dramatic growth at Facebook (20 percent vs. July) All the typic [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: Compete | Stats: Size

A report analyzing traffic and click-through rates from ad network Chikita finds that "Bing users are over 50% more likely to click an ad on your site than Google users." What this means, according to the post, is those who arrive at third party sites via Bing click more frequently on ads on those sites than those coming through Google. TechCrunch offers a bit more detail and speculation about why this might be (i.e., "the law of large numbers"). According to Chikita, the respective click rates are: Google: .97 percent Yahoo: 1.24 percent Bing: 1.5 percent Bing appears has made some [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Microsoft: Business Issues | Microsoft: Partnerships | Stats: Compete | Stats: comScore | Stats: General | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Search Behavior | Stats: Size | Top News | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: Partnerships | Yahoo: Search Ads

Mobile search engine Taptu has just launched a free iPhone app ("alternative search machine"). It's the first iPhone-specific search engine but Taptu has been doing mobile search for some time. According to the company the engine crawls the web and indexes "iPhone friendly pages" that are optimized for the device. The index is much smaller than a conventional search engine but "growing every day" according to Taptu. It offers "preview cards" that create a very Palm Pre-like experience. You flick or horizontally scroll through preview pages (showing mostly real-time images of the sites) and [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | SEM Industry: Conferences | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Search Behavior | Stats: Size

In the world of competition between and among websites, search engines and online publishers there is also the "behind the scenes" competition between Nielsen and comScore. Both want to be the source of record for traffic data and both are occasionally the subject of controversy. There was the incident early in 2008 where comScore put out a report that Google's paid clicks were down, sending Google shares down. But when Google announced a very strong Q1, comScore shares then took a hit and the company had to go into damage control mode. More recently Nielsen reported that despite Twitter's [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Search Engines: Video Search Engines | Stats: comScore | Stats: General | Stats: NetRatings | Stats: Size

According to data released yesterday by the IAB/PwC on Q4 and full year 2008 online advertising revenues, performance-based advertising and search gained while other segments declined slightly or were flat. Overall, online advertising grew 10.6% in 2008 to reach $23.4 billion. US online ad revenue in Q4 was $6.1 billion, up from $5.8 billion in the third quarter of last year. Especially noteworthy for the readers of this blog, search ad revenues comprised 46 percent of Q4 online ad revenues, up from 42 percent a year ago. Here are a selection of charts from the report: [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Marketing: General | SEM Industry: General | SEM Industry: Stats | Stats: Size | Stats: Spend Projections

Metrics firm comScore released mobile internet usage data earlier today. It indicates significant growth in the numbers of people accessing the internet from their mobile phones vs. a year ago. The company says that today there are just over 63 million mobile web users in the US and 35 percent of them are online via their handset daily. The daily mobile internet user population has more than doubled in one year: I've written up the findings in some detail on my LocalMobileSearch blog. While the highest frequency users are on smartphones and the iPhone in particular, comScore says [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Search Marketing: Mobile | Stats: comScore | Stats: Search Behavior | Stats: Size | Top News

More than half of all search queries are at least three words long, and more than a third are four words or longer. That's according to Hitwise data (PDF) released today: As the chart shows, 1- and 2-word queries are becoming less common, while 4-, 5-, and all the way up to 8+ word queries are becoming more common. The numbers are very similar to what Hitwise shared at SMX West a couple weeks ago. The takeaway point here is that the so-called long tail of search continues to get longer. As searchers get more sophisticated in how they use Google, Yahoo, Live Search, etc., it opens up [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Search Behavior | Stats: Size | Top News

Microsoft just released results of a survey of 400 small businesses (SMBs) that shows they continue to struggle with search marketing (how to think about it, how to do it). This is consistent with what I and others have observed about the majority of SMBs, even those with websites. The search engines want to reach this massive market directly but have found it very difficult to do so without working with established sales channels and partners (newspapers, yellow pages, webhosts, etc.) that have existing SMB relationships. That can be problematic in some cases because the various revenue shari [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Microsoft: Bing Ads | Stats | Stats: General | Stats: Size

Nielsen released some UK mobile usage data yesterday that are very interesting on a number of fronts. The highest-level findings reflect that in the UK the mobile internet is growing much faster than the PC internet (8x) and that the average age of mobile users is younger than online. There are now more than 7 million mobile internet users in the UK according to Nielsen. That compares with more than 40 million in the US. The mobile internet audience is about 20 percent the size of the UK online audience. In the US, where the raw numbers are much larger in both categories, the proportion [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Features: Analysis | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Stats: NetRatings | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Search Behavior | Stats: Size

How big is Google's web index? Google hasn't said for years and still isn't saying -- but it is blogging today about how it "knows" of 1 trillion web-based items. Joy, we haven't had a search engine talk about pages it knows about to confuse things since the Lycos days. Glad to have Google making the first shot to take us back into the search engine size wars of old. As a short refresher, Google used to list the number of pages it had indexed on its home page. It dropped that count back in September 2005, after Yahoo (for a short period) had claimed to have indexed more. Both sear [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Google: Marketing | Google: Web Search | Stats: Size

Mapquest arguably "owns" the mapping brand online. It has been the dominant mapping site for years by a wide margin. But that dominance may now be slipping under pressure from Google. Hitwise reports that "traffic to Mapquest has remained flat year on year and is down 20% in the past 6 months. Google Maps traffic is up 135% year on year and is up 7% in the past 6 months." According to Hitwise, after Mapquest, Google is the number two mapping site, followed by Yahoo and then Microsoft's Live Local. Hitwise's Heather Hopkins argues that the traffic trend is based almost exclusively on Goog [...]

Related Topics: AOL: MapQuest | Channel: SEO | Google: Business Issues | Google: Critics | Google: Maps & Local | Google: OneBox, Plus Box & Direct Answers | Google: Universal Search | Microsoft: Bing Maps & Local | Stats: Size | Yahoo: Maps & Local

Online ad revenues recorded 25 percent year-over-year growth for a $5.2 billion dollar performance in the third quarter, according to the IAB. Growth from last quarter was a less impressive 3 percent, however. The Internet is on pace to break $20 billion in ad revenues this year, compared with $16.9 billion for 2006. The first nine months of the year generated $15.2 billion in online advertising. Paid search represents a steady 41 percent of revenues. Techmeme has more discussion. [...]

Related Topics: Business Issues: General | Channel: SEM | Search Ads | Stats: Size