Google Universal Update’s BIG Traffic Winners
Bill Tancer, analyst at Hitwise, earlier released new data comparing Google's web properties before and after the release of Google Universal Search. The article titled Google Universal Search – Video and Maps Benefit, reflects how forceful the changes in Google's vertical search results are.
Hitwise reports:
Our column in TIME this week is about Google's dominance of the search market which, as of this week, measures at 64.8% of all U.S. Internet searches, more than double the nearest competitor Yahoo! Search. I've had many requests for an updated Google Properties chart posted here, but decided to do a pre/post analysis of the recent Google Universal Search initiative announced May 16, 2007.
It appears from this early analysis that the big winners for this new format are YouTube and Maps, while image search and News (which under the older format were occasionally featured top of page) are on the losing end.
Overall, Google Maps and YouTube saw the biggest increase. Google Maps reflected a 20% rise in web traffic because prior to Universal Search, the Internet search engine only displayed map results for a very limited set of queries. Now, Google Maps results take up to 3 of the 7 web search results. YouTube garnered an 8.26% increase in traffic since the launch of Universal search. Before, YouTube videos were not shown in Google's web search results.
