100000 Visits To Google Minus Google
Six weeks ago I read an article in the NYT about Google becoming a media company. I wanted to contribute to the discussion about Google emphasizing their own sites in search results. So I created Google minus Google, a search engine that uses Google to get the search results, but filters out all links to Google-owned sites.
The site has found quite an audience and yesterday Google minus Google reached 100000 visits, which is a whole lot more than I thought of when creating the service.
The visits come from around 80 thousand or so unique users and in total there has been more than 128 thousand searches. After all of the huge PR the service got (NYT, Lifehacker, CNET, the Register, Nu.nl and more than 300 blogs), the daily number of visitors has declined, but the usage per user has been increasing all the way.
It’s not a surprise that many people who enter the site for the first time have tried it if the service really works, therefore most of the top searches relate to Google. In total there have been 55 000 different queries. It’s interesting that a huge portion of those are names, which could mean that people are really interested only in themselves.
20 most popular queries on Google minus Google
| 3652 | |
| youtube | 3182 |
| test | 1140 |
| knol | 615 |
| lol | 325 |
| gmail | 231 |
| porn | 211 |
| you tube | 164 |
| orkut | 163 |
| riemurasia | 155 |
| video | 126 |
| sex | 124 |
| diet coke and mentos | 120 |
| blogger | 119 |
| novophone | 106 |
| miseta.net | 91 |
| nu | 87 |
| “armeense genocide” | 86 |
| maps | 83 |
| asd | 80 |
Please try Google minus Google, if you haven’t tried it before.
Google minus Google v2 launched
Google minus Google, a search engine that lets you Search with Google without getting results from Google sites such as Knol, Blogger and YouTube has become an unexpected hit. After the launch on Monday thousands of people from all over the world have used the tool and it has been a topic in numerous blog posts and discussions on Friendfeed.
After the launch, several people have suggested that I should have used Google Custom Search (cse) to do the job. After some hard detective work I have swithed to CSE. Detective work - you ask? Yes, the reason for my initial solution to just use the basic Google search engine and remove the google sites in the query (using “-site:google.com etc”) was not technical. I needed to gather all the domains Google owns before I could use cse.** The list of Google domains in the exclude list of Google minus Google contains more than 2500 domain names. And it needed some work to compile. I’m sure I have missed something, though.
Enjoy the new and more useful version two of Google minus Google.
** For you techies out there: cse doesn’t allow wildcard usage in the top level domain (like google.*), but it can be used in the normal query.
Google Minus Google: Google Search Results Without Content From Google
Inspired by an article in NYT about Google becoming a media company, I decided that something had to be done. So I created a way to Search with Google without getting results from Google sites such as Knol, Blogger and YouTube.
The result is Google minus Google.
UPDATE: Google minus Google has gotten a huge start: 3000 visitors in the first day! The visitors came mainly through a few Finnish IT news sites: Digitoday, that interviewed me this morning, IT-Viikko and Tietoviikko. I’ve also updated the filters to include some Google domains: Jaiku, Gmail and Blogspot
UPDATE 2: Version 2 of the launched. Now built with Google Custom Search Engine.
UPDATE 3: Miguel Helft continued the original story in the New York Times blog with an article about Google minus Google. He had received a statement from Google: “For years, users have been able to customize their experience via the advanced search feature within web search, and we welcome all efforts that help deliver useful information and expand user choice.” So I guess I’m of the hook for now.
Smart Aggregation, Not Search or RSS, Is Key In Getting Valuable Traffic
Fred Wilson has shared where the traffic to his blog, A VC, comes from. He made an important notion on how the majority of users have come to his site through search engines, but their dominance has declined in the past year. He notes that an almost good a source has been from sites he calls smart aggregators. By these he means sites that aggregate either algorithmically (Techmeme) or through user behavior (Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon) the most important new articles. The importance of these aggregators will surely continue to grow especially in topics like technology.
As Fred mentions himself, the traffic from RSS-readers has not increased for him, because they just are too hard for the average user to use. I have to admit that I personally fall into the same category. It’s not that I don’t see the value of RSS-readers, it’s just better (easier, faster) for me to get a pre-prioritized list of the most important news and post through Techmeme or even Friendfeed.
For most publishers and bloggers getting traffic from these smart aggregators is more valuable than getting traffic from search engines using some random keywords. Fred Wilson correctly divides search engine results between “search bookmarks”, which should be counted as direct traffic, and real search. The importance of Search Engine Optimization is not diminishing: see my earlier post about the declining importance of URL’s in navigation as opposed to search.
List of Google Killers: Search Engines of the Future
I’ve compiled a list of search engines that will change the way search engines work. I’ve only listed general-purpose sites, not niche or vertical search engines focusing in a specific type of information. I’m not really claiming these services will replace Google as the number one search engine any time soon, but they will at least have an effect on the way Google and the other large search engines will develop their core function.
List of the search engines of the future:
Read more…
Search Engine Usage Differences Begin to Unfold
In my earlier post I was wondering about the differences of user behavior and efficiency between the biggest search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live Search). I just stumbled upon this earlier piece of from Mashable that tells us that there are clear demographic differences between the sites. Gmail users are younger and make more money than the users of the two other services.
Compete Blog Tells How People Behave Online
The Compete blog is my new favorite blog. I’ve learned quite a lot on user behavior online after I discovered it a few days ago. Which big search engine is most efficient and why people fill in complete URLs into the search boxes instead of the address bar have made me think about the user differences between search engines. (The answers to both questions can be found in the enlightening comments.)
Also worth reading are what were the biggest sites in 2001 and how are they doing now and an anatomy of a web meme.
Subscribe
Follow me on Twitter