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Google Reaches Second-Most Visited Site Status
Another anonymous reader has written to mention a story carried by Bloomberg, which has the news that Google is the second-most visited site on the internet. This puts it out in front of Yahoo!, which previously held the position. Google is now just behind Microsoft which, as the submitter pointed out, is the site that IE defaults to. From the article: "Visitors to Google's sites rose 9.1 percent to 475.7 million in November from a year earlier, while those to Yahoo sites rose 5.2 percent to 475.3 million, ComScore Networks Inc. said today. Both sites trail Microsoft, which had 501.7 million visitors, ComScore said. It is the first time that Mountain View, California-based Google attracted more visitors than Yahoo, reflecting Google's growing popularity outside the U.S."
Who the hell uses Yahoo?
Do they mean MSN?
i wonder if the firefox start page counts as a visit to Google
if so, that probably had a lot to do with the numbers as well
And then there was E
I will admit: There's not a single day I do not visit http://www.google.com/ at least four times.
MS would never be in first place without the default page being set by them in IE. Personally, I never leave a computer set to MS as the homepage, I switch them to Google. :) I'd much rather look at that then MSN gossip.
The only thing I'm wondering is what the hell took them so long.
Google is still (IMO) the best search engine out there.
Also, they make sure to attract the tech-savvy amongst us by being open-source friendly, adding lots of niche searches, their "Don't be evil"-motto, and being for so many of us the place we dream to work.
Sure, every now and then someone questions their "Don't be evil" policy, but compared to at least MS they win hands down. And Yahoo just isn't relevant, at least to me.
In short: Other search engines do marketing, Google goes viral in the very best way: By being the best, and giving us what we want.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
Since last time I looked (a few weeks ago) Yahoo had a reasonable advantage. Then I thought Christmas shopping, I know how I start looking for gifts, ideas and the stores to purchase from. It will be interesting to see if Google maintain this after the holiday period. What I did find a tad curious with the numbers are the youtube figures, massive increase, but I will stick by my initial opinion that this is a Titanic for the moment.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
History is to be made, bring out the wget, bring out the sticky F5 keys, tonight is the night - Google becomes one.
And the Firefox default to Google is not a false hit?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Last I checked, "Google" and "Microsoft" are not single sites. Do they mean hits to microsoft.com and google.com? What about MSN? Google Maps? Windows Update? Gmail? Hotmail? Google Groups?
This article is all fluff and goes into no explanation of their tallies. Microsoft is most likely getting inflated hits because of thier browser defaults, but that could also be true of the default search in Firefox being Google.
I'm glad this guy posted his e-mail address at the bottom of the article. If I get a reply I'll post his research methods here.
Perhaps it is, but people have to make a choice to install Firefox, where IE is the default browser for 95% of the computing populace. Most of the non-computer savvy people I know click the Big E on their desktop, and wait for the MSN page to load, and promptly hit whatever bookmark they wanted once the page loads: they don't actually use the MSN portal for anything.
I'd figure a good chunk of the people who run Firefox change their 'home' bookmark almost immediately. I did, but granted that was right back to Google's personalized homepage...
As the article has correctly pointed out, IE's browser defaults to Microsoft's page. A similarity to Netscape back in the hayday.
Nobody can mistake Google's dominance over the Internet, its popularity is dictated (for right or wrong) by its rich source of search tools. They saw the importance of search over all the other providers.
The old saying "if you build it, they will come" rings true here, Google have not only done very well in search, but have captured a large chunk of web based email.
It doesn't default to Google on *my* computer. Perhaps that is the defaul on MS Windows - I get some Apple page...perhaps there's a reason for that (I don't think I set it manually, but it could have 'imported' it from Safari or something).
Max.
I wonder if Micro$loth is also including hits to windowsupdate.microsoft.com? Certainly, with all the windows PCs constantly hitting that server looking for updates, many of them automatically and without the user's active knowledge, it would rank quite highly.
I mean, I remember all the yahoo commercials years ago, but I don't recall ever seeing a Google commercial. And despite the ads, google came out top. Now, if there were google commercials, I haven't seen them, but I've used it since I first of them, it was a "clean" site, unlike the messy yahoo page full of crap I didn't care about.
Good point... seems a bit more fair when the underdog does it though, doesn't it? lol...
Now that Google is #2, it's time to drop it and move on to the next new (or old) search engine. Before Google, I remember using Webcrawler and later on Dogpile. So what's next?
Which search engine do you think we should propel up the charts?
The submitter points out that Microsoft comes up first but it is also the default home page for IE.
But Google is preset as the home page on Firefox.
When Apple was shipping Macs with Netscape Navigator preinstalled, they defaulted to an Apple-themed Netscape news page. People using AT&T DSL are getting routed to a Yahoo page quite often thanks to the SBC/Yahoo marketting partnership. Lots of people leave the homepage to whatever their ISP's software sets up. I've had people call me because they lost their homepage (it got hijacked, kids changed it, whatever) and they want assistance changing it back. When we gets to the point where it's time to type in the address, they ask me what they need to put in. I tell them whatever they want to come up and they don't have a clue, many think the homepage s part of their ISP settings so to have AOL coming up instead of ______ means they're now on AOL. Few of them seem to actually use their home page, it's just what comes up and then they go where they want to from there.
To really make these figures more accurate, we would need to sets everyone's homepage to (blank) and make them all reset it, but you would still have people setting it back to things they don't use because "that's how it was before".
Can I ask you why you prefer Firefox to Safari? Whenever I try Firefox, it always seems to me that Safari is faster, cleaner, renders pages better, and integrates better with OS X technologies like the Keychain, not to mention generally behaves in a more Maclike way. And KHTML supports more CSS properties (text-shadow and display: block come to mind). What am I missing that's so great about Firefox?
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
200+ million active accounts is a great big chunk of hits right there.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
That's the second-biggest website I've ever seen, 99.
http://outcampaign.org/
Given Y!'s recent re-design, I an unsurprised. I used to have Y! as my home page, now it's Google news.
IMHO, Yahoo has made the fatal mistake of over-emphasizing form over function and is now suffering the result.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
False hits? Did they happen in an alternate universe? Oh that's right, you don't want the raw data. You want it to fit with your preconceived notions...
That's because tech-savvy Firefox users never have to go to www.google.com. They type "google " in the address bar instead!
"Microsoft, which had 501.7 million visitors" - those are passive MSN page loads, that should not be counted as visits. I often notice this default left at my clients, but have yet to see somebody using it. As well as Media player forceful "rich" interface horror.
Besides, google start page often is used for similar purpose - just because it loads fast, is probably useful, and looks more attractive than about:blank.
Servant of karma
It's all about the add-ons. Firefox add-ons give the browser extra functionality. I don't know if Safari has similar functionality (I am not an OS X user), but I'm pretty sure that the sheer number and diversity of add-ons for Firefox would be higher. I use lots of different plugins, from the download statusbar (I hate that download window) to the web developer plugin (great for lots of different things).
Many people find adblock and noscript very useful. Don't forget about greasemonkey, which is helpful for some of the more annoying sites. The list goes on and on. While the browser itself might not be as good as Safari, for some Mac users, the ability to customize is worth it.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Just because IE is the default doesn't make MS its default: Google has been making deals with many OEM's (e.g. Dell, the #1) to have its toolbar preinstalled and default to its homepage (no doubt you've seen http://www.google.com/ig/dell). I'd be curious just how many people that is, but throw in the 10-15% from Firefox and I'd bet it's over 50%.
1) I've always used Firefox, since before Safari appeared.
2) I've tried safari. Not that much different, but I don't like some aspects of it. I forget all the reasons, but one of them is that the tabs each have 'x's on them, instead of one on the right, which doesn't fit into the way I view web pages (open many, reading one at a time, closing them as I go). Safari is usable, but I don't see any reason to change.
3) I use Linux and MS Windows as well (at work), so Firefox provides some cross platform uniformity - though not a lot, I think, since the menus are all different/etc/etc.
4) It's free(er?).
5) I like Linky and a few other configurable options, which I don't know how to do in Safari, and since I do know in Firefox, I see no reason to find out - even if it's possible.
The argument that it integrates better doesn't work with me, since I don't much like OS X's interface.
Max.
But Google is preset as the home page on Firefox. ... To really make these figures more accurate, we would need to sets everyone's homepage to (blank)
Is Google the default homepage of Firefox? I thought it was the Mozilla page. Most GNU/Linux distros do exactly what you want, they have a local start page which is a file on the system. With free software, the default is what the last person to build it says it is. Many will leave the project defaults alone, some will not, then users will almost always put in their own choice. The kind of people who go out and get free software are not the kind of people who will settle for default behavior.
The weight of defaults must be balanced for distribution use. M$, unfortunately, still owns 80 to 90% of the desktop market and 80% of that uses IE. That Google trails by such a small margin is a measure of real popularity and use.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Is this a new feature? Firefox for me defaulted to a blank page, I think (I changed it and I don't see any way to "change to default" so I can't check). I think you may be confusing the default page with the default search for the search entry?
If so many people don't even bother with the trivial task of changing their homepage to something less annoying, or are incapable of it, we are doomed as a species. I wonder if these people also use the Microsoft page to search for Google?
... and then they built the supercollider.
CMD-W is much quicker for closing tabs and pages than mousing around for a close button.
... and then they built the supercollider.
According to Alexa Yahoo has 49% hits on mail.yahoo.com msn has 89% hits on hotmail.msn.com and google has 69% on google.com
So there arn't any "false" hits, most of the hits for yahoo and msn arn't for their search pages (which is the case for google) but for their mail services.
It's funny if you think about it. Why would anyone visit Google's site? Yeah yeah, to see an almost blank page with just a Search button. Many people search the Internet using the Google toolbar, so that could as well be added to Google's numbers, as that's all Google has on it's homepage. In that case I have Google's homepage always open when I used the net. Maybe toolbar numbers also are included in the calculation.
I think what we all want to know is: Which domain has the most 'active' hits. Does anyone know whether or not it includes windows update? Heard a lot of talk but no answer yet.
so these results mean their data is also indicative of people who dont run an antivirus as the reputable AV companies detect Comscore as a malicious program and will remove it not to mention all the anti-spyware programs do the same (and average joe is starting to realise about spyware and takes steps to protect themselves)
so their results are about as meaningful as Alexa as the user has to have the spyware installed in both cases as well as implicitly tell their AV/AntiSpyware to ignore it
Most people do not want to look at MSN.
They do not know how to change the home page, or regard it as too much work.
All this chatter about the default browser being the reason MS is #1,
yes that maybe the case, but a bigger factor is their default status as OS used by most, so even without auto updates, it would be hard to beat them in web hits.
i think google is lacking, trying to do anything besides search you get shown to this page of links. 75%% of which would never apply. I avoid google for this reason. AltaVista is the best search engine, when using a 486.
The data was collected by Comscore, which installs Trojan horses on Windows PCs to spy on users' Internet activities. See Blocking Marketscore: Why Cornell Did It and many other Marketscore references on the net.
Most of the non-computer savvy people I know click the Big E on their desktop, and wait for the MSN page to load, and promptly hit whatever bookmark they wanted once the page loads: they don't actually use the MSN portal for anything.
I'm computer-savvy and use Firefox as my default (Windows) browser, but I still use IE occasionally for website testing, etc. I use it so rarely that I leave the MSN portal as the default. So I can attest to this behavior.
Who did MSN pay to be the default search engine in IE7?
Hence the name: Monopoly.
...is of course about:blank.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Did this confuse anybody else?
If the user doesn't know that Microsoft is searching for updates... they don't need to.
Netcraft.com rankings: http://toolbar.netcraft.com/stats/topsites?s=2629A F9E8226E9D5E21D0E6F8945#89"
1 http://www.google.com/ November 1998 Google Inc. Go US
2 http://www.yahoo.com/ August 1995 Inktomi Corporation Go US
3 http://www.google.de/ April 1999 Google Inc. Go US
4 https://www.google.com/ May 2002 Google Inc. Go US
5 http://www.google.co.uk/ April 1999 Google Inc. Go US
6 http://www.google.fr/ November 2001 Google Inc. Go US
7 http://www.microsoft.com/ August 1995 Microsoft Corp Go US
8 http://mail.google.com/ June 2004 Google Inc. Go US
9 http://news.bbc.co.uk/ December 1997 BBC News Online Go UK
10 http://www.bbc.co.uk/ August 1995 BBC Internet Services, Docklands. Go UK
Slashdot is some 89 today.
Looks like the rank depends on who does the counting.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
to they take nameserver lookups from the root zones as a 'hit'? if so, is that a brilliant idea as there are name caches. i cannot see what is the device used? do ISPs count the traffic packets to given ip addresses? i really don't see an accurate or honest method.
Why UNIX?
...that WIndows users can't change a home page: heck, they can't even figure out how to remove the ad stickers plastered over their palmrests.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Years ago, I decided to use yahoo for almost everything. Not because yahoo the best at everything, but yahoo gave me "one stop shopping." Now yahoo is mucking evrything up so bad, I am feeling forced to leave.
I gave up yahoo search, in favor of google. I have left yahoo message boards after they screwed those up. Now their photos section is seeming just as badly borked. I don't like the way yahoo's mail editor works now either, especially when it comes to cut-and-paste.
Yahoo used to be all server based, and everything just worked. Now it's all javascript cr@p, that looks fancy, but sucks.
a mouse click is only one action - if your finger is already on/near the button; which it is as, at the time, I am often scrolling down using the wheel.
ctrl-w, while quick, also requires at least two fingers, and often both hands.
having said that, I use ctrl-w on occasion too - works just fine in firefox too, it's just that firefox gives you the option (and I don't think Safari does, but I could be wrong).
Max.
Google is now just behind Microsoft which, as the submitter pointed out, is the site that IE defaults to
Yes, once again, in Slahsdot's rush to bash Microsoft, they are embracing and distributing misinformation. IE defaults to MSN, not Microsoft.
The Slashdot FUD campaign against Microsoft continues!!
Sure, every now and then someone questions their "Don't be evil" policy, but compared to at least MS they win hands down.
So in this analogy, Google is to Microsoft as Microsoft is to Apple.
Apple: the beloved brutal monopoly of the Open Source community, despite the fact that OS X is not open source, and that Apple has always been aggressively hostile toward anyone making either hardware or software which works with Apple computers.
Slashdot zealots are to Apple as Far Right fundamentalists are to Mary Cheney.
Reality seems to present zealots with so many inconvenient truths.
Yeah, Safari has similar functionality. Also, if you like Firefox's DOM Element Inspector, you really owe it to yourself to check out the element inspector available in the latest nightly builds of WebKit. This thing is fucking amazing, and speaking for myself, I find it far more elegant, intuitive, and useful than aforementioned DOM Element Inspector.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
"I use Linux and MS Windows as well (at work), so Firefox provides some cross platform uniformity... The argument that it integrates better doesn't work with me, since I don't much like OS X's interface."
Dude, dumb question perhaps... but... if all this is the case, why are you even using a Mac at all?
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
That sounds like an OSS cop-out answer. How many people who read the Firefox advert in the NYT decided to change the homepage? Probably the same number who changed the IE homepage.
Also interesting is how Konqueror on Mandriva still goes to a mandriva page even after you've changed it...
Well, I had to use it for a few years to give it a chance, didn't I?
I still don't like it, so, on my powerbook at least, I've switched to ubuntu. That has it's problems too, but at least the UI is flexible enough for me to get it working that way I want. You see, I'm used to using SGI IRIX 4Dwm, with many years of using it. I've given Apple's UI a chance, and I still find it doesn't work very well, so I've switched to Ubuntu for most work. I'm told that even MS Windows allows you to change it's behaviour to work the way you want (I've not tried it though); it's only Apple that thinks they know better.
I still have some Mac apps that are good enough for me to want to keep OS X on my Mini - iMovie, iDVD, FCP, DSP, Airfoil, Addressbook (for typing SMS messages from my Bluetooth connected phone), among others.
Also, Apple Macs are damn good machines (IMO) - pretty reliable (though my Powerbook is getting somewhat flaky these days), good looking and all the connectors I want - they're also one of the few laptops that ship with full size firewire ports (for which I have some drives/etc). It's the GUI I don't care for - I wish we didn't have to pay the Apple tax for their OS when I'm just going to over write it with Ubuntu anyway; else I'd be all over a new Intel powerbook (or whatever they're called now).
Max.
You shold look at this site: http://duke.hr/. It has aggregation of all search engines, but it still seems unfinished. It would be good to see more of this as alternative way of searching.
It seems to have escaped many of Slashdot's readers that ComScore isn't the authority on Internet traffic. According to NetCraft, Google is the #1 most visited website. These "most visited site" statistics should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, 89.3% of statistics are made up on the spot anyway ;)
There are three type of lies. Lies, damn lies and statistics. Mark Twain.
See Matt Cutts (high up engineer at Google) post about yahoo changing their mail interface to AJAX and hence losing lots of pageviews. Essentially, page views is just a dated metric since there is no reliable way to count AJAX requests, which are substitutes for pageviews.
CMD-W works in nearly every Mac application, and certainly Safari.
... and then they built the supercollider.
It looks like the owners of Comscore are going on an astroturfing blitz trying to make their service look reputable. Even their biggest fans admit their methods are "wildly inaccurate," and that's really just a nice way of saying "grossly incompetent."
Just to give you an idea, they reported a uniques number for a major website of about 1.3mm/mo when the Apache logs of the self-same site reported ~30mm/mo. Doing some Alexa checks showed the monthly uniques to be (depending on your analysis methods) ~12mm/mo up to ~19mm/mo. So giving Comscore the greatest benefit of the doubt means they were off by about 10x.
For some perspective, that'd be like the census bureau saying "The number of citizens in the United States is 4,000,000 with a margin of error of 1000%". No, not 1%, 10%, or 100%, but 1000%.
Please, please, PLEASE stop reporting Comscore as being authoritative on anything until they've cleaned up their methods. Alexa, with all its warts, is way more accurate.
Sure, but it doesn't on Linux or MS Windows.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying I should change just to use Safari? That's the whole argument *against* using Safari - if I use Firefox, I don't have to change...if I were to change, I might as well just click on the tab's 'x' to close it.
It's just another example of Apple thinking they know better than I how my muscles work.
No, we're not all the same; *I* work different*ly*.
Max.
Max.
They paid themselves one penny more than what anyone else would have paid to be the default.
If Yahoo were willing to give MS two million dollars to be the default, and MS decides to ignore their offer and sets the default to MSN, they've just lost a potential two million dollars.
It's not free for Microsoft to set their own defaults any more than it is for a shop owner to close up shop for a day. That's what economists call opportunity cost, and it's very real.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Our website http://www.mathpotd.org/ was up about three weeks ago. If we search 'K12 Math Problem of the Day' with Yahoo, the website is listed as the second item. Searching the same phrase with Google, it seems it never lists our website. I guess if you want Goolge list your website, you need money. I become more and more doubt why Google is so 'discriminated' and it is still so popular.
Interesting! So why wouldn't Microsoft sell the opportunity, or at least present it, to several potential buyers? What do they gain by placing their own search engine as default instead of another?
When it comes to sales and marketing, I consider Microsoft to be practically of genius level, so can that be construed as a mistake on their marketing department behalf?
No, it's just an example of a different system than you are used to, not active contempt. You could always reconfigure your shortcuts to suit your muscle memory, if you were to use a Mac.
... and then they built the supercollider.
> I'm not sure what your point is,
...and that's just one example (if it's true). The other examples of issues I have trouble with are: 1) menu bar at the top of the screen, 2) click to focus, and 3) clicking brings window to foreground. There's no way to change these 'features' to what I'm used to. On some Linux window managed, for example, you can make it behave the Apple way, or the IRIX way, or the MS Windows way (pretty much). I'm told you can also make MS Windows behave the IRIX way, to a large extent. It only seems to be Apple that think that everyone must be the same and must do it their way.
OK...
> because I was speaking with a Mac user - where CMD-W works perfectly, and is the standard shortcut.
Sure. I have no trouble with cmd-w, per se. That's not what this discussion is about.
>
> It's just another example of Apple thinking they know better than I how my muscles work.
>
> No, it's just an example of a different system than you are used to, not active contempt.
> You could always reconfigure your shortcuts to suit your muscle memory, if you were to use a Mac.
But that's the problem. It isn't possible to do that.
The discussion isn't about the cmd-w, but about the 'x' on the tabs on their web browser. I'm used to having the 'x' in the same place all the time, not have it move around all over the place depending on which tab and how many tabs I'm looking at.
Note the recent change in Firefox's default behaviour, which was to make it the same as Safari's - the 'x' is attached to the tabs. It was annoying that they did that, since I have been using the other behaviour for a long time and saw no reason to change. However, it didn't take long for me to discover the method to change it back. As far as I'm aware, there's no such way to make Safari put the 'x' in the same place all the time (ie on the far right of the window.
In many ways, I think Apple is worse than Microsoft. If they had the same market share as Microsoft, I think they would have just as bad business practices too (though I'm not sure).
Max.
Well, that's not really about muscle memory, because your brain still needs to interact with the screen to hit the target. It's more about a UI convention/habit.
The other examples of issues I have trouble with are: 1) menu bar at the top of the screen, 2) click to focus, and 3) clicking brings window to foreground. There's no way to change these 'features' to what I'm used to.Well, you can change the "click to focus" behavior, not sure about the others, though. It's fairly irrelevant though. Every system has conventions that are difficult to change or work around. It seems that the Mac conventions have lasted the longest - with most desktops today copying Apple conventions. After all, MacOS was around long before Linux, and systems including Windows and Linux have taken inspiration from it. You don't have to use it.
I must say that I find it ironic that a *nix user is complaining about a GUI behavior - as it is typically those users who bemoan using a GUI at all, saying that real users use the keyboard.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Max.