Google v. Technorati (and Hitwise v. Comscore)

by Michael Arrington

Metrics company Hitwise writes a sensational blog post showing the dramatic rise of Google Blog Search against competitors Technorati and Sphere. Their data is saying that this week, for the first time, Google Blogsearch surpassed Technorati in total visits.

Google Blog Search just passed 0.0025% of total internet traffic, according to Hitwise, v. 0.0023% for Technorati. The reason for the surge seems pretty straightforward: Google linked their Blog Search product to Google News in October, which had a immediate and significant impact on traffic. Google also added a Blog Search link in the “More” section on the Google main page. It was not enough to take the lead, but a recent Technorati decline in traffic put Blog Search on top.

It makes sense that the extra attention Google is giving BlogSearch would result in a spike in traffic, but we looked to Comscore for confirmation. What a surprise.

Comscore tells a much different story, and one that makes little sense given the facts. The most recent Comscore data (November) says Technorati had 3 million page views v. Google Blog Search’s 1 million. But Comscore also shows highly erratic Technorati data over the last twelve months, swinging from a high of 22 million page views in April 2006 to a low of 1 million in December 2005.

We’ve seen situations where Comscore showed erratic traffic swings before. In August Comscore showed a significant decline in Del.icio.us traffic, when Hitwise said it was increasing. Yahoo showed disclosed some internal traffic stats and it turned out Comscore was dead wrong. In the case of Technorati v. Google, it looks to be wrong again.

(c) www.techcrunch.com

Google Top Searches: Based on Everything and Nothing

by Michael Arrington

Google made a clarification today to their much criticized list of most popular queries in their search engine. The list raised eyebrows because it included some fairly unlikely terms. “Bebo” for example, was the number one term on the list.

In the original announcement, Google said: “Google today announced its annual Zeitgeist, featuring lists and charts of the most popular and fastest-rising global search terms that people have typed into Google.com.” It turns out that while that statement was literally accurate, it was still somewhat misleading.

In the clarification today, Google said: “we do not simply retrieve the most frequently-searched terms for the period — the truth is, they don’t change that much from year to year…Instead, we looked for those searches that were very popular in 2006 but were not as popular in 2005 — the explosive queries, the topics that everyone obsessed over. To come up with this list, we looked at several thousand of 2006’s most popular searches, and ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2005. (”Bebo”, for example, had very little traffic in 2005.) We also gave a bit higher score to searches with more traffic. Similarly, our “what is” and “who is” lists are not necessarily the absolute most frequent searches, but rather those that best represent the passing year.”

I agree with Liz Gannes at GigaOm. If at the end of the day Google is taking the top few thousand searches, subjectively picking a handful that are interesting and then redetermining the order based on velocity of growth rather than overall rankings, we end up with a list that is, in the end, completely meaningless.

(c) www.techcrunch.com