Search engine statistics

James Lamberti, Vice President of Search Solutions at comscore Networks, presented today at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. comScore gathers its data from 1.5 million users and Lamberti provided some interesting statistics on search behavior.

  • Toolbar searches in the United States have grown 136% since June 2004.
  • 18% of searches come from toolbars.
  • 58% of searchers have not installed toolbars.
  • 12% of searchers have uninstalled the toolbar.

20% of the search users constitute 68% of the search volume. These users are less likely to click a sponsored link (27%).

The search race is closer than I thought. comScore measured the work search market share as 37% Google, 30% Yahoo!, and 19% MSN based on total searches.

Craigslist postings transmitted to space

On May 15, 2005 the Deep Space Communications Network will transmit craigslist postings, a video message from Craig Newmark, and a clip from “24 Hours on craigslist” from Cape Canaveral into space.

This announcement seems like an April Fool’s joke. A view of Earth through craigslist postings would be an odd cross-section of our culture. Hopefully the Voyager interstellar records are discovered first.

David Sifry 106 Miles talk

I just finished editing the audio of David Sifry’s talk at the February meeting of 106 Miles, a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers in Silicon Valley. Dave shares his experience as an entrepreneur with examples focused on his current business Technorati. The MP3 file is 17 megabytes in size and 74 minutes and 46 seconds in length.

Next month’s 106 Miles event will address financing a new business, a great choice since over 20 minutes of the last meeting dealt with venture capital investments and had all entrepreneurial engineers tuned-in.

Questions

  1. 00:00 Brendon Wilson – Have you given much thought to the legal exposure to use content that is not necessarily Creative Commons licensed or is Creative Commons Non-Commercial? Has anyone asked to be removed?
  2. 06:24 Glen Reid – Seems like you should be able to check for a Creative Commons license to use the feed and display full-text if you would like.
  3. 07:16 Tantek Çelik discusses license relationship value in HTML.
  4. 08:49 – How does Google get away with caching pages? I use Firefox with AdBlock. Aren’t you worried about that?
  5. 17:53 – How did you start four startups in such a short time in such disparate areas?
  6. 25:36 Russell Beattie – What is your long-term vision for Technorati?
  7. 34:15 Gordon Mohr – How has Technorati been funded and is there a point in time in which it switched from being hard to fund to being easy?
  8. 50:32 – Besides the money where does the VC add value to you? What makes the VC more than just the money itself?
  9. 53:51 – Do the VCs vary the amount of risk they are willing to swallow?
  10. 55:41 Joyce Park – At the last 106 Miles we had Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, we were particularly interested in their partnership since they have done multiple things together. You, on the other hand, have gone from being CTO — the technical guy — to being the guy. Could you tell us about that?
  11. 65:00 Jeremy Zawodny – How do you go about your decision making process? How do you decide when to drop everything and focus on a big event versus long-term roadmaps?

Rumor: Yahoo! has purchased Flickr

Yahoo! supposedly purchased Flickr last week and will make an official announcement on March 1. I have heard similar chatter and frequent Flickr sightings on the Yahoo! campus. How will Flickr manage its community in a buyout situation? What will happen to pro-level users? It seems like Pyra all over again.

[Update 22:02] Two sources claiming one degree of separation tell me the rumors are true. Purchase price is rumored to be around $40 million. Caterina Fake neither confirms nor denies the claim. I guess we will know more in five days.

Web Spam Squashing Summit will not be broadcast

Tomorrow’s Web Spam Squashing Summit will not be broadcast to the outside world. No IRC, no audio, and no video stream will be published of the event.

We wanted to be able to have the most relevant technical participants in attendance, not just the employees who have cleared enough rounds of public relations training to be able to speak on behalf of their respective organizations.

We have assembled many of the key players from the academic, search, and web publishing world to exchange ideas and implementations both in deployment and under development. I am excited to see what may come of the event.

The tools we all use will benefit from the discussion, even if the end-users are not aware of all of the details involved behind-the-scenes.

Just some of the organizations represented in their respective industries:

Indexing

  1. Amazon.com
  2. Ask Jeeves
  3. Feedster
  4. Google
  5. Project Honey Pot
  6. Technorati
  7. Yahoo!

Publishers

  1. America Online
  2. Blojsom
  3. Buzznet
  4. Google
  5. Microsoft
  6. PGP Corporation
  7. Six Apart
  8. UserLand
  9. WordPress