Hitwise: Facebook Beat Google On New Year's Day

Traffic stats again put social network ahead of search giant

As Facebook employees went back to work this week, they may have been smiling more (or at least less frowning less) than most other people returning from vacation. Their site performed admirably over the holidays, actually attracting record-breaking amounts of traffic.

On Tuesday, we documented the fact that Facebook received more traffic than Google on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. That made it the most visited U.S. site for the first time ever.

This afternoon, Hitwise's Bill Tancer provided some more data. He wrote, "Facebook was able, albeit by a slighter margin, to recapture the #1 position on Friday, New Year's Day." Tancer also created the graph you see below.

Obviously, it doesn't look like Facebook's destined to attract more individuals than Google on a permanent basis. Still, the social network's done quite well over the last couple of weeks, closing the gap that somehow opened up during the first half of December.

This repeat occurrence of Facebook beating Google on a holiday also creates the question of how often it'll do so in the future. Will a switcheroo occur on Valentine's Day? St. Patrick's Day? No Housework Day? We'll see.

By Doug Caverly

Google Ditches Local Listings for SEOs and Designers

Why is Google Eliminating Local Results for SEOs?

As 2009 came to a close, Google managed to get SEOs riled up for one last controversial topic. For some time, SEOs and web designers have been noticing that Google has not been showing local listings in search results for queries related to their businesses - even location-specific ones.

Should SEOs and designers be worried about local listings? Comment here.

As Matt McGee mentions in a Search Engine Land piece, even a query like "candy" without any geographical indicator will bring up a seven-pack of local results, but a query for "seo" or "web design" or even something as specific as "web design vancouver" will bring up no local listings whatsoever (although the organic results still heavily favor local businesses in location-specific queries).

Needless to say, some SEOs and designers are taking this as something of a slap in the face, justified or not. Search engine optimization and web design are both services after all, and just about every other type of service you can think of will yield local listings in a Google search.

While this phenomenon was originally thought to be a bug, Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick fame points to a Google Maps Help thread where a Googler going by Joel H. tells a different story:

Today, we're intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn't display local listings today. We believe this is an accurate representation of user intent. In some cases, we do show local listings, however (as NSNA/php-er noted) [web design in bellingham]. I'm sure some of you feel we should be displaying local results for queries like [Web Design Vancouver]. I understand that concern, but based on our understanding of our users, we feel this is the right decision for now.

I'll give the usual disclaimer that we're constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we're doing today.

So if you use the word "in" in your query, you are more likely to get the local results. Some still have a hard time finding the logic in this move.

"I'm all for their interest in balancing for user intent - it's their business, their product - but I'm missing the logic here," comments Bill Sebald.

"I find this disturbing," says Scott Clark. "If I have a physical location in a given area, offer a service to customers in that area that is close to their query, then onebox listings should appear as they do for other creative-class industries."

Not all SEOs have such a problem with what Google is doing though. "I want to be found by people everywhere, not just in the small city I happen to live in at the moment," a content writer comments.

"But you would think that if people typed in a city name or other location, they are actually looking for local results and the maps could be useful," they add. "Although if you have optimized your website for your location, you should get found anyway. And I do all my work online, people don’t need to visit me or even know where I am located so in that sense the maps aren’t always useful or necessary."

People are saying that in some countries, they are still seeing local results for the type of query in question. It is possible that Google has just not rolled out the changes everywhere yet. The quoted content writer suggests that Google just doesn't know the user-intent of all of its countries' people as well as it does for the countries where the changes exist.

What do you make of Google showing less local results for SEOs and web designers? Will it hurt local businesses? Share your thoughts.

By Chris Crum

Good News For Facebook: Virtual Stuff "To Make Billions"

Virtual goods market may soon be worth $5 billion

Facebook - along with a few other social sites and the developers of games for them - may be in for a great few years. Certain experts believe that the business of virtual goods is going to take off in a big and very profitable way.

Here's the opening line of a new article from the BBC: "Virtual goods such as weapons or digital bottles of champagne traded in the US could be worth up to $5bn in the next five years . . ." Which would correspond to a whole lot of nonphysical stuff, if you consider that transaction prices are often in the $1-$2 range.

Still, the BBC interviewed Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Playfish's Tom Sarris, and a casual gamer on its path to that conclusion. Plus, there are the recent deals involving Zynga and Playfish to consider ($180 million and $400 million changed hands), along with the fact that Asia's virtual goods market is already worth around $5 billion.

Toss in Facebook's semi-sporadic support for its payment system and the new Preferred Developer Consultant Program, and it's not hard to imagine that a great deal of growth in the virtual goods space is indeed possible.

Sarris addressed critics by saying, "The way we look at it is it's no different from paying money to go and see a movie or rent a DVD. What you are paying for is the experience and that notion of entertainment."

By Doug Caverly

Google Gets Into The DNS Business. Here’s What That Means

Google just announced Google Public DNS, a new service that lets consumers use Google as their DNS service provider. The benefits to users are a theoretically faster and more stable browsing experience, and some additional security against malware type sites. The benefit to Google – tons more data, and some potential revenue.

Here are the basic instructions on how to use it (and Google has even provided phone support).

The service competes directly with Sequoia and Greylock backed OpenDNS, a four year old service that has had tremendous usage and revenue growth. OpenDNS is resolving 20 billion DNS queries per day, and has 15 million end users. Here’s an overview of how OpenDNS works.

In 2008 OpenDNS was making $20,000/day in revenue when they were resolving just 7 billion daily queries.

Here’s how money is made – when users enter a URL that can’t resolve, the service puts up its own landing page with search results and advertisements (Update: Google isn’t redirecting to search results like OpenDNS does. odd). And companies are very willing to pay for DNS services like these to stop employees from hitting malware sites (they are simply blocked), or other sites (porn, Facebook, etc.).

Update: OpenDNS has responded to the new Google service here.

Update 2: I spoke with Prem Ramaswami, the product manager for Google Public DNS. He the goals are speed, security and validty of DNS responses. They will follow DNS protocols to the letter, he says, which means no blocking, hijacking or filtering of queries at all. It’s all about speed. Prem points out this page that goes into technical detail on the speed improvements – and they’re sharing this with the community.

On privacy: Here’s the policy that says what’s being collected and how long they’re keeping it. Collected data includes IP address (up to 48 hours, to detect malicious behavior against the service), ISP information and geographic information (2 weeks each). The data is not correlated with your Google account in any way, they say.

The average user does about 1,000 queries per day, says Prem.

By Michael Arrington

Google Gets Patent For YouTube Gaming

Annotations intended to allow for interactive games

Using YouTube may become a much less passive experience in the near future. Google's received applied for a patent on a "Web-based system for [the] generation of interactive games based on digital videos," and several facts point to the search giant moving ahead with the idea.

Let's start with an overview of the patent. As explained in the official application (hat tip to Erik Sherman), "The present invention includes systems and methods for modifying playback of online hosted videos via interactive annotations, allowing the creation of interactive games."

The application later added, "Some examples of annotations are graphical text box annotations, which display text at certain locations and certain times of the video, and pause annotations, which halt playback of the video at a specified time within the video. Some annotations, e.g. a graphical annotation (such as a text box annotation) comprising a link to a particular portion of a target video, are associated with a time of the target video, which can be either the video with which the annotation is associated, or a separate video."

Considering that YouTube can already handle annotations and time markers, this concept would be easy enough to implement. That's one possible hurdle down.

Another factor is that interest in "choose your own adventure"-type uses of YouTube is high. People have been writing about the subject on a regular basis since at least late 2008, meaning YouTube hasn't prepared to meet a demand that doesn't exist.

Finally, YouTube filed for the patent on February 19th, and since patent applications can get tied up for years, it's important that this one isn't too dusty.

By Doug Caverly

Nexus One Price, Plan Details Leak

Prepare to pay $180 + $80 per month

A couple of the mysteries surrounding the forthcoming Nexus One/Google phone may have been solved. Information related to the price of the phone and its plan has leaked, and assuming the details are accurate, the device should line up pretty well with the existing marketplace.

Here's the bad news: rumors that Google would offer a cheap or free phone weren't confirmed. The standard monthly fee doesn't look like it will be trivial, either, meaning the Nexus One may not be as revolutionary as many people expected.

Instead, according to Jason Chen, consumers will be asked to pay $179.99 for the Nexus One if they lock into a two-year contract with T-Mobile for $79.99 per month. Or they can choose their own service provider, but they'll have to fork over $529.99 for an unlocked phone.

Still, these prices aren't so high that ordinary people wouldn't be able to get their hands on the Nexus One. Indeed, the T-Mobile prices should make the Nexus One competitive with the iPhone, so if the hardware measures up, Apple may find itself with a serious rival.

Hopefully we'll get firm numbers and a much more solid idea of the Nexus One's capabilities on Tuesday at the Android press gathering.

By Doug Caverly

Google Loses Domain Name Dispute

Canadian startup beats odd by remaining Groovle

Google's empire hasn't exactly crumbled, and to be honest, the average person will probably never even realize what's happened. But what's happened is this: for just the second time in its history, Google's lost a domain name dispute.

Google submitted a complaint about a site called Groovle to the National Arbitration Forum (which ICANN lets decide domain name disputes) on November 6th of this year. The search giant argued that Groovle is "nearly identical or confusingly similar" to its own name.

Complicating matters is the fact that Groovle markets itself as "your groovy custom search homepage," while noting on every page, "Groovle.com is not owned, operated, or sponsored, or endorsed by Google."

Anyway, a bit of back and forth ensued. Then the National Arbitration Forum sided with Groovle, and in a document released today, it explained the decision.

"Respondent argues that the disputed domain name is not a misspelling of Complainant's mark; Respondent asserts that the disputed domain name contains the significant letters 'r' and 'v' which serve to distinguish the sound, appearance, meaning, and connotation of 'groovle' from Complainant's GOOGLE mark. Furthermore, Respondent contends that its alterations clearly transform the predominant word of the domain name to 'groove' or 'groovy,' not GOOGLE. . . . The Panel agrees . . ."

This is a blow for Google in a symbolic sense, at least - it's participated in 65 disputes - even if the development has no measurable effect.

By Doug Caverly