what’s in a name … oh nothing at all.

smiles jeff

The first problem with it is that no accounting of unique users, which elminates skew associated with the number of page views visited within each domain. This would give a better indication of which Google services are more popular than others (with respect to each other).

The other problem is that they don’t indicated anything with regard to “market share” where the market is defined by the competing services offered by other companies. Why is the term “market share” being used when there is no data from other Y or M services?

I also belive Google’s minimilst interface will get beaten unless they change it first. Then web and search are moving away from being a list of links on a page to being more of a rich experience, but still simple, or simpler to use.

Case in point about over reaching: Google Mars. what a waste of time. As a google shareholder, that kind of thing miffs me. It got buzz for one day, 10 people looked at it and no one ever will again and it does zero for their revenue near or long term.

Om, your analysis is misleading at best. The first set of percentage numbers gives the breakdown of popularity within the top 20 Google domain names. “Gmail = 5.51%” means that 5.51% of all visits to Google websites are visits to the Gmail website, NOT that Gmail holds only 5.51% of the web-based email marketshare. Same with all the rest of the list.

The only number that pertains to your underlying argument (Google Reality Check) is the number for Google Finance, which indeed talks about market share for financial websites.

You would do well to precise these things in a follow-on post, because most readers do not scroll though all the comments, especially those reading from feed readers.

So I decided to check Yahoo and MSN ! 73% of MSN traffic is for Hotmail and 54% of yahoo is for Yahoo mail . Time for a reality check for Yahoo and MSN ?

1) Search is universal but portal, email etc are more fragmented. If you go to China, Japan or UK, people use google search but not necessarily Gmail or Y! Finance. It would be interesting to know total search vs email traffic breakdown.

2) Not all pageviews are equal. My feeling is search makes a lot of more money than portal. I dont remember I’ve even clicked ads on Y! Finance but I do when I search stuff to buy on google.

3) Text ads are much more effective than flashy graphics. I did some experiements and was shocked to see the difference between text ads and graphic banners on the same page for google adsense. This explains why google is making more money than Yahoo with less traffic.

Google seems to do a good job making ad money, but can’t even effectively advertise their own products on their home page. Sort of ironic. The simplistic design of their homepage has always been praised as a reason for their popularity, but if Google wants to grow its service offerings they will need to figure out an effective way to gain awareness.

Right now these services seem to operate in a vacuum and Google is not realizing synergies that could be made through cross-promotion.

I don’t get the point of this analysis, other than showing that search is still Google’s primary thing?

When you add text search and image search together, you get more than 89% of all of Google’s activity going to search. Yes, you don’t use maps as frequently as you use search. But do you use mail throughout your day? How about news?

These aren’t even coming close. It has implications on what Google will be when it “grows up.”

More here.

Google never wanted to be a portal, and their traffic shows that despite the launch of many new products and services (everything from Finance to a Calendar) they are succeeding in not becoming one.

I also think that Google suffers from the “Nimoy Syndrome”

Do you agree? ~G~

When will you Americans learn not to fear your Canadian brethren! When???…oh, you meant them…

The only meaningful metrics would be comparing each service to comparable ones – how does Google Maps traffic compare to Yahoo and Mapquest? How does Google Video compare to YouTube? Etc.