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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."

39 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Do they mean MSN?

    1. Re:Microsoft? by Coneasfast · · Score: 3, Informative

      The article isn't very clear. It could be just microsoft.com (although I doubt it), or maybe all microsoft-owned sites: msn.ca, hotmail.com, etc. Also, does google include gmail?

      These statistics don't explain much, other than Google is rising in the ranks.

      --
      Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
    2. Re:Microsoft? by GrumpySimon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I believe so - according to Alexa, the top five (in order) are, Yahoo, MSN, Google, Baidu.com and MySpace.

      So, yeah, MSN.com and not microsoft.com or even (we can only hope) windowsupdate.com

    3. Re:Microsoft? by HUADPE · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.
  2. Re:What about Microsoft? by Timesprout · · Score: 2

    They are probably saying nothing of the sort since they are the top ranked site and their hits are up by 3.3%.

    --
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  3. Remove the false MS hits and see where it stands by ZahnRosen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. Why so late? by Esteanil · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Why so late? by eMbry00s · · Score: 2, Informative

      They have no monopoly to leverage, they have made no direct commercials (though that doesn't mean their marketers have a low budget).

    2. Re:Why so late? by Broken+scope · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You know, its the rude, arrogant, and self absorbed creative people like you that get the pleasant and intelligent creative people killed.

      --
      You mad
    3. Re:Why so late? by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The only thing I'm wondering is what the hell took them so long.

      Keep in mind this is comparing domain traffic. Yahoo is much broader than Google in terms of services.

      --
      Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
    4. Re:Why so late? by Esteanil · · Score: 2

      What are you talking about?

      I changed to Google as my search-engine of choice before they ever made the mass-media, and they *rocked* compared to *anything* that'd come before them.
      What's really special about the Google story is how they managed to hold on to me, and as this story submission proves, billions of other users.

      I must admit, I really love what Google has done to the web. They've proved that companies don't need to be huge gorilla assholes to make billions of dollars. You just have to deliver.

      --
      I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
    5. Re:Why so late? by Scrameustache · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Until a few years ago Google search sucked from a great height You misspelled "Until Google, search engines sucked from a great height".
      --

      You can't take the sky from me...

    6. Re:Why so late? by owlnation · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Until a few years ago Google search sucked from a great height, returning vast abouts of garbage mainly consisting of outdated and broken links.
      Are there two Googles? I ask because nearly 10 years ago I was pointed towards Google by one of my university professors before the site was really public. At the time the choice was Yahoo, Altavista, or Infoseek or similar. Google search actually worked, compared with the metatag spammed crap that was the others. Google gained ground virally because it really worked.

      If anything the opposite of what you suggest is true, now that Google is regarded as the best search engine many SEO blackhats are trying to game it. So actually it is less accurate than it was a few years ago - but still the best though.
  5. Re:Yahoo? by Ulysses_S_Grant · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Geeks rise from your graves! by gulfan · · Score: 4, Funny

    History is to be made, bring out the wget, bring out the sticky F5 keys, tonight is the night - Google becomes one.

  7. Re:What about Microsoft? by AchiIIe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I agree, I would like to see this list
    According to: http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500
    1) Yahoo
    2) Microsoft
    3) Google

    according to the article
    1) MSN
    2) Google
    3) Yahoo

    so the lists are ugh, exactly reversed?
    I'd love to know what methodology they used.

    --
    Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
  8. Re:Remove the false MS hits and see where it stand by Timesprout · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And the Firefox default to Google is not a false hit?

    --
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  9. Re:Remove the false MS hits and see where it stand by faedle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  10. Re:What about Microsoft? by dwater · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...correct me if I'm wrong, but that behaviour makes no sense at all.

    --
    Max.
  11. Re:Yahoo? by B3ryllium · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Umm, if you want to include services, then I only have one thing to say:

    YouTube.

  12. Re:Remove the false MS hits and see where it stand by ZahnRosen · · Score: 2, Funny

    Good point... seems a bit more fair when the underdog does it though, doesn't it? lol...

  13. IE defaults by towsonu2003 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Google is now just behind Microsoft which, as the submitter pointed out, is the site that IE defaults to.
    Sometimes I just don't get it. Why wouldn't you change the default homepage of your browser? Is Microsoft that interesting?
    1. Re:IE defaults by Cheapy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      To the average Joe Consumer, it has everything they need. Small snippets of news, sports stuff, stock things.

      People also might not know how to change it.

      --
      Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
  14. None of these results are "correct" by SeaFox · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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".

  15. Is Hotmail included in the MS count by Timesprout · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?
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  16. Re:Defaults indeed by Shabbs · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So, when an IE user who has not modified their default home page wants to do a search on Google, it's first a hit against Microsoft (which they had no intention of using) when they start up IE, then a hit against Google (which they did intend to use).

    I wonder what the stats would be if they pulled out the "initial default page" hits.

    Cheers.

    --
    Mark
  17. Yahoo!'s redesign to blame? by whoever57 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  18. Re:Remove the false MS hits and see where it stand by Timesprout · · Score: 2, Interesting
    people have to make a choice to install Firefox
    Absolutely but they are not installing Firefox just so they can have Google as their home page. Google are paying Mozilla for this to be the case, which ironically was an MS monopoly abuse when they released IE7 with MSN as the default but configurable search around here (even more interestingly MS has since changed it to Google).
    --
    Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
    What truth?
    There is no dupe
  19. Re:What about Microsoft? by Cheapy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Make their website the default one of Internet Explorer and have IE always send the first few packets of a session there?

    --
    Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
  20. Re:Yahoo? by natd · · Score: 5, Funny

    ..wooosshhhh...

    --
    Only big ligs use sigs.
  21. Re:Yahoo? by KIAaze · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, I don't deny that yahoo has some good services, but I just got this logging out from yahoo mail with Firefox 2:
    http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/3834/stupidyahoop p9.jpg

  22. Re:Remove the false MS hits and see where it stand by strstrep · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  23. way too low of numbers by ILuvRamen · · Score: 2
    Visitors to Google's sites rose 9.1 percent to 475.7 million in November
    even if they meant unique visitors, that's REALLY low. If half of americans vistited google once in november and we're not nearly the most connected country, it'd only take about double that number in addition to come up with that. With like 6.5 billion other people in the world (something like that), I think they could come up with more than just an additional 300 million, geeze. It's probably more like close to 3/4 billion unique visitors.
    --
    Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
  24. Re:Remove the false MS hits and see where it stand by Felonius+Thunk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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%.

  25. Re:Remove the false MS hits and see where it stand by dwater · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
  26. Re:Yahoo? by node+3 · · Score: 2, Informative

    You ought to read the article. It's quite short.

    It states, "visitors to Google's sites rose". In other words, they are counting all the sites.

    It also states, "visitors at YouTube, bought by Google for $1.65 billion in November, rose more than 24-fold to 107.9 million, ComScore said."

    The article doesn't explicitly state that YouTube was counted in Google's numbers, but it's highly implied.

  27. Re:Remove the false MS hits and see where it stand by Handover+Phist · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Google are paying Mozilla for this to be the case, which ironically was an MS monopoly abuse when they released IE7 with MSN as the default


    Who did MSN pay to be the default search engine in IE7?

    Hence the name: Monopoly.
  28. Netcraft report by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  29. Re:Remove the false MS hits and see where it stand by dwater · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.