People apparently turn to Craigslist in a down economy.
(Credit: Hitwise)Craigslist overtook MySpace as the most searched-for term on the Web last week, according to traffic-tracking firm Hitwise.
"U.S. searches on the term 'Craigslist' have increased 105 percent for the week ending March 14, 2009, compared with the same week last year," Hitwise reported. MySpace has been the top term since March 11, 2006.
This was the first time in three years that searches for Craigslist topped MySpace, Hitwise said.
The research group suggested more consumers are logging on at Craigslist, the Web's largest classifieds publication, as the ailing economy prods them to look for bargains.
Craigslist spokeswoman Susan MacTavish Best said the privately held company, headquartered in San Francisco, has seen a sharp uptick in business.
Over the past year, bartering on the site is up 100 percent while roommate ads have jumped 65 percent, she said. Classified ads for garage sales have doubled and For Sale postings are up 75 percent.
Don't call Google's search business a monopoly, the company's executives have reminded us.
Unfortunately, we're running out of other ways to describe it. Researchers at Hitwise released new data Monday indicating that Google in July topped a 70 percent share of U.S. Web searches (70.77 percent to be exact). That's up 10 percent from the same month a year ago and 2 percent from the previous month. Yahoo search was second at 18.65 percent, MSN search was third at 5.36 percent, and Ask.com came in fourth at 3.53 percent.
At 70 percent, Google is joining a club of tech giants that really know how to dominate a market, including Cisco Systems in routers, Intel in chips, and Microsoft in a whole bunch of stuff.
Now before I get e-mails from Google's lawyers, let's add these caveats: There's probably no magic number at which trustbusters decide a company must be brought to heel. But with increasing dominance, comes increasing scrutiny by folks in Washington.
A few weeks ago, my colleague Charles Cooper discussed the "M" issue with Google's general counsel, Kent Walker, and Dana Wagner, the company's U.S. competition counsel. Their take, not surprisingly, is that it's inappropriate to compare Google's search dominance to IBM's mainframe business in the 1960s or Microsoft in the 1990s.
"The nature of the Internet is just a fundamentally different world from the sale of packaged software or the bundling of software with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers)," Walker said. (It's a terrific audio interview that's worth listening.) "The standard line we have is that competition is just one click away."
Maybe so. But that competition is starting to look mighty small by comparison.
By scrutinizing the traffic Google searches produce, Internet analysis firm Hitwise in January predicted that Google might launch a virtual world. Lo and behold, Google launched Lively on Tuesday. So what's next?
Google Autos or Google Music are the guesses that Hitwise hazarded Wednesday. "Our thinking was that Google might want to fill natural gaps in its portfolio of offerings based on the interests of its users. We looked at which categories are receiving the most traffic from Google in which Google does not have its own property," Hitwise's Heather Hopkins wrote in a blog post.
In the top 20 classes of Internet sites toward which Google sent traffic, only three have no corresponding in-house Google project, according to Hitwise's June 2008 research.
"The data suggests Google Autos and Google Music," Hopkins said. "I am not sure we'll see Google Government just yet!"
(Credit:
Hitwise)
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