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.
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…
Startups from Finland: MuslimSpace is a MySpace Clone for Muslims
MuslimSpace is a social networking site for Muslims that’s based in Espoo, Finland. According to Alexa they reach 145k users per week. The users come from around the world. The top three countries are Malaysia (18.5%), United States (13.6%) and Serbia and Montenegro (12.3%).
MuslimSpace is very much a MySpace clone especially when looking at the profile pages which feature all the same elements as MySpace. Besides the usual networking features the site also has blogs, photo galleries, groups, polls and forums.
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.
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