Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
Yahoo has a lot of services other then their search. For example, they own flickr and del.icio.us. Fantasy sports and games are also pretty easy to figure out on Yahoo. Also, Yahoo news is far more popular then Google's news. Yahoo may not have the best search, but they have a lot of very good services.
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
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...
Umm, if you want to include services, then I only have one thing to say:
YouTube.
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".
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
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!
Gmail is hosted at https://mail.google.com/ since it is under the Google domain name, I would be very surprised if they didn't include Gmail. In fact, were they not to, the statistic could safely be dismissed as meaningless.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
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.
Who did MSN pay to be the default search engine in IE7?
Hence the name: Monopoly.