Gmail, Google Maps Among Fastest-Rising Google Properties

Gmail and Google Maps are two of Google’s hottest properties, while YouTube and Google Image Search are falling on the list of the most popular Google properties. That’s according to Hitwise data that tracked U.S. visits to Google sites during the month of March:

Gmail is the big winner here, surpassing YouTube as the number two Google property — something Greg reported last month. Google Maps is also on the rise, perhaps spurred recently by the dislay of Google Maps listings on non-local queries.

To put this in perspective, we can turn back the clock to early 2008, when Hitwise showed YouTube as Google’s number two property, and Gmail in the fourth place spot:

In addition to Gmail, Google Maps continues to take a bigger piece of the overall Google pie, up to 2.25% in March from 1.56% in early 2008. You could go back even further to a post I wrote charting Google Maps growth, which shows that it got only 0.79% of all Google traffic in late 2006.

Overall, Google’s “we’re-not-a-portal-even-though-we-have-everything-a-portal-has” philosophy is taking a hit: Google.com shows a 1.6% drop in share since early 2008, which means all those “non-portal” portal properties are rising as a group.