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Nielsen/NetRatings earlier this week unveiled May 2007 data for top U.S search providers. To no one’s surprise Google maintained a comfortable lead over its competitors. It accounted for over 4 billion search queries, far outpacing Yahoo, who came in at just over 1.5 billion. Google held 56.3% of the search market share for May, slightly up from its 55.2% share last month.
Originally posted on June 22, 2007 @ 1:15 pm
comScore released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In May 2007, Google Sites captured 50.7 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining one full share point from the previous month. Yahoo! Sites maintained its second place ranking with 26.4 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.3 percent), Ask Network (5.0 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.6 percent).
Google Sites led the pack with 3.9 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (2.0 billion), Microsoft Sites (782 million), Ask Network (384 million), and Time Warner Network (348 million).
Americans conducted 7.6 billion searches online in May, up 4 versus April and up 11 percent versus May 2006.
Originally posted on June 23, 2007 @ 9:52 am
CastTV announced its first customer agreement, licensing its innovative video search technology to TV Guide. TV Guide’s Online Video Guide uses CastTV’s proprietary technology to help power its search index.
TV Guide’s Online Video Guide is focused primarily on professional and independent entertainment video available on the Internet, and provides users with better, more relevant, targeted search results in an uncluttered manner. Under the terms of its two-year customer agreement with TV Guide, CastTV’s video crawler automatically indexes content from top entertainment destinations including major broadcast and cable networks, movie download sites, sports sites and aggregators of professionally produced content.
“CastTV is helping us to extend our powerful brand, and guidance and navigation leadership to the Internet,” said Paul Greenberg, general manager, TV Guide Online. “Using CastTV’s indexing technology, we have been able to ensure that TV Guide is providing users of our Online Video Guide with a unique and relevant way to search for entertainment video on the Internet.”
Currently in private beta, users will soon have a chance to experience CastTV this summer with the launch of its consumer destination.
Originally posted on June 21, 2007 @ 9:30 am
Truveo announced that its video search engine has reached an audience of almost 40 million monthly unique visitors. Since October of 2006, it has also seen a 50% month-over-month increase in usage across all of the websites powered by Truveo.
“Users are realizing that their favorite video may no longer be available on video sharing sites due to copyright issues, but they can still easily find legal versions of those videos elsewhere on the Web through a video search engine like Truveo,†said Timothy Tuttle, CEO and Co-Founder of Truveo and Senior Vice President of AOL Video.
In addition, Truveo™, which already powers some of the most popular video sites on the Web, extended its reach with a number of significant new partners who are using the company’s video search engine to power video search on their websites and applications. These new partners include: Brightcove, Clevver, CSTV, Flock, Pageflakes, PureVideo, Qwest, Search.com, Sportingo, Netvibes, Widgetbox and YourMinis. These new partners join AOL Video, AOL Search, Excite, Infospace, Microsoft Corporation and hundreds of others who are already using Truveo.
Originally posted on June 20, 2007 @ 11:54 am
Times Online (UK) reports that “News Corporation has discussed swapping MySpace, its internet social networking unit, with Yahoo! in return for a 30 per cent stake in the enlarged group.”
BloggingStocks is saying that this is a favorable deal for Rupert Murdoch and a questionable one for Yahoo.
If Murdoch could complete this deal, he would realize a 21x increase in the value of his $580 million investment back in the summer of 2005. Yahoo was worth $37 billion yesterday, 25% of which would be worth $12.3 billion. And the nice thing for Murdoch about getting stock would be that he would not need to pay tax on the gain until he cashed out the Yahoo shares.
But for Yahoo, the deal would be of questionable value. As Murdoch pointed out in a recent interview, Facebook is grabbing share from MySpace. From this comment, I infer that Murdoch is not eager to or does not know how to adapt MySpace to regain the competitive initiative. Moreover, Yahoo is so stressed out trying to compete with Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), that it will not be able to devote the resources needed to keep up with Facebook.
Editor’s question: If you’re Yahoo, would you go for this deal?
Originally posted on June 20, 2007 @ 10:18 am