Category: Google

Google has released a new online tool called ‘Government Requests‘ that chronicles the number of data requests and removal requests the several Governments have issued on Google. As Google notes, this is not exactly a measure of the censorship among Governments since countries like Brazil and India are in the top of the list primarily because Google’s social network, Orkut is popular there and the company deals with a lot of impersonation and defamation cases

Here are the top 10 countries in terms of data requests
1. Brazil
2. United States
3. United Kingdom
4. India
5. France
6. Italy
7. Germany
8. Spain
9. Australia
10. Argentina

The top countries in terms of data removal requests
1. Brazil
2. Germany
3. India
4. United States
5. South Korea
6. United Kingdom
7. Italy
8. Argentina
9. Spain
10. Australia

Microsoft has been slowing clawing its way up the search engine market share. But no, Google is not feeling the heat. Rather, it is the other search engines in the fray that have been losing search engine market share to Bing. Google, on the other hand is still steadily increasing its own market share.

Compete.com’s report for search engine market share at the end of February shows a 0.6 percentage points rise for Google in market share compared to the January ’10 numbers while Microsoft has grown by 0.5 percentage points. Yahoo has in fact lost 1 percentage point – not that it should matter. Yahoo anyway is in the process of completely outsourcing its search engine to Microsoft.

Here are the total number of search engine queries recorded on the top search engines for the month of February 2010

Google : 10.936 billion
Yahoo : 2.445 billion
Microsoft : 1.582 billion
Ask : 286 million
AOL : 149 million

The rise of Google has been an amazing success story in the past decade. As of July 2008, over 1 trillion pages had been indexed on the Google search index and the number could have well multiplied over since then.

Despite the various properties that the company owns, nearly 97% of all its revenues come from online advertising. Here is a timeline chart of Google’s revenues, the share from advertising and profit since 2000

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Companies spend thousands of dollars in trying to get their websites up on the first page of search engine results. A recent study by iCrossing underlines the need for the same. The report claims that hardly 2.5% of website traffic comes from Page 2 of search engine results. Here are some interesting stats

Google
Page 1 : 95.8%
Page 2 : 2.5%
Others : 1.7%

Yahoo
Page 1 : 95.2%
Page 2 : 2.8%
Others : 1.9%

Bing
Page 1 : 95.0%
Page 2 : 3.4%
Page 3 : 1.6%

Google is no doubt the biggest online ad network worldwide. As we had reported earlier, nearly 50% of Google’s ad revenues come just from the US. So, how much has its revenues grown over the past year? The list below is the global advertising revenues that includes the share paid to publishers via Adsense

Q4 2008 : $5.50 billion
Q1 2009 : $5.33 billion
Q2 2009 : $5.33 billion
Q3 2009 : $5.75 billion
Q4 2009 : $6.46 billion

As an Adsense publisher, most of us would have wondered the exact share of the ad-click revenue that Google shares with us. Interestingly, this can be roughly measured by looking into Google’s quarterly financial reports where they specifically mention these details. Here is what publishers roughly made through the past one year

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Remember our post on the cost of iPhone components? The manufacturing cost of the iPhone worked out to $178. Nexus One is just marginally cheaper – at $174.15. Here is the breakdown of the cost

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With more and more webmasters focusing on SEO to get to the top of the search results, it is probable that the users are finding it more difficult to exactly find an answer to their query. The result – increase in the use of long tail keywords in search. Here is the current share of keywords of different length used in Search engines like Google (growth since last year given in brackets)

One word : 24.32% (0%)
Two words : 23.55% (-1%)
Three words : 20.52% (-1%)
Four words : 13.69% (-1%)
Five words : 7.94% (1%)
Six words : 4.30% (2%)
Seven words : 2.33% (3%)
Eight and more : 3.35% (6%)

India and Brazil are pretty similar when it comes to website preferences, be it in search, social networking or anything else. Google dominates in these two countries. Here is how Google fares in these two countries in each of the different categories (based on the percent time spent on the Google site compared to others)

Search (based on volumes)
India : 88.4%
Brazil : 89.5%

Social Networking (Orkut)
India : 68.2%
Brazil : 96%

Maps (Google Maps)
India : 63.9%
Brazil : 70.9%

Photos (Picasa)
India : 16.2%
Brazil : 8.9%

Blogs (Blogger)
India : 47.6%
Brazil : 43.7%

Multimedia (Youtube)
India : 82.8%
Brazil : 91.6%

Email (Gmail)
India : 46.8%
Brazil : 9.7%

In India, Google is omnipresent. The top five websites in India are Google.com,Google.co.in, Yahoo, Youtube and Orkut – a 4/5 dominance by Google. So is Google’s dominance in Brazil. Here are the top ten global markets for Google in terms of the percent of time spent by the internet users on Google sites.

1. Brazil : 29.8%
2. India : 28.9%
3. Ireland : 15.9%
4. Singapore : 14.3%
5. Portugal : 13.3%
6. South Africa : 12.9%
7. Mexico : 12.8%
8. Italy : 12.4%
9. Austria : 12.1%
10. Denmark : 12.1%

Clearly Orkut is the reason why Brazil and India spend nearly double the time on Google than other countries in the list.