The Seattle-Search.com Blog

comScore has released the December rankings for search engines; and here are the results.

In December 2006, Google gained .4 share from November, to lead with 47.3% market, and Yahoo! went up .3, continuing with the second largest share of 28.5% . Microsoft share dropped .5 points to 10.5% share, Ask fell .1 points to 5.5% share, and Time Warner share shrunk by .2 points, to close at 4.9% share.

In addition, comScore notes that:

• Americans conducted 6.7 billion searches online in December, up 1 percent versus November. Annual growth rates in search query volume remained strong with a 30-percent increase since the same month a year ago.

• Google Sites led the pack with 3.2 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.9 billion), MSN-Microsoft (713 million), Ask Network (363 million), and Time Warner Network (335 million).

Rumors are floating that Microsoft is about to come out with a free Web analytics service which will rival Google Analytics.

The project is currently called Gatineau and a Welcome page is now live, but you can’t login just yet. Little is known about Gatineau at this point.  It is noted that the project is code named Gatineau after the city in Canada where DeepMetrix was based.

Microsoft has announced it will begin to update the Virtual Earth(TM) online mapping platform with new, more detailed U.S. imagery under an agreement with GlobeXplorer LLC, a leading global provider of aerial and satellite images.

The deal is part of Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to bring consumers the most up-to-date content and help them easily explore broader geographic areas through the Live Search Maps service (http://maps.live.com/ ), which is powered by Virtual Earth.

As part of the deal, more than 400,000 square miles of U.S. aerial imagery will be enhanced with high-resolution coverage. Microsoft and GlobeXplorer plan to integrate the new imagery into Virtual Earth over the next several months.

More information about the Virtual Earth platform is available at http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth .

Seattle’s Medio Systems has announced it will provide T-Mobile USA’s search platform for mobile phones. The search capability will be used on the phone’s storefront, also called a deck. It will allow users to search for ringtones, wallpaper and other content. It will also be used for some local listings found in the White Pages and sports scores.

Medio recently secured $30 million in venture capital and is winning deals at major carriers including Verizon Wireless and Telus.

The latest success appears to supplant InfoSpace, which previously handled the search engine for T-Mobile, and is just across the pond in Bellevue.

On Friday, T-Mobile, also in Bellevue, said InfoSpace continues to be a partner.

In a move of inter-galactic proportions, the planet’s leading search engine has announced a partnership with the University of Washington, among others in academia, to create the world’s largest database — a moving picture of the entire universe.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, is planned to begin operation in 2013 on a mountaintop in Chile, The telescope will take moving digital images — rather than the typical static snapshots — of all space, the entire visible sky. “It will be the greatest movie of all time,” said UW astronomer Craig Hogan, one of the leading scientists working on the project. “It will transform how we do science.”

The Google announcement was timed to precede the Seattle conference frequently dubbed the “Super Bowl of Astronomy,” the national meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Some 2,500 professional stargazers gathered at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center for four days starting yesterday to discuss such exotica as supernovae, quasars, astrobiology and the mysteries of dark matter and gravitational waves.

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Microsoft has a built-in incentive program that some pundits — including former MS super-blogger Robert Scoble — believe could be a secret weapon in the battle for search market share against Google, Yahoo and ASK.

The concept of Achievement Points and a Gamerscore has become more popular than Microsoft ever imagined. Building on the time-honored, incentive marketing redemption power of cumulative awatd poin programs like the classic S&H Green Stamps (circa 1896) and frequent-flier miles, the Microsoft Xbox 360 thought it had a brainstorm when it borrowed a page from the past.

The “Achievement Points” were so successful that Microsoft decided to productize the idea. MS mandated that every developer of Xbox 360 games “hide” 1,000 achievement points in every retail game and 200 in every casual game. Players would earn points for certain successes in the game. The more challenging the task, the more points are added to the player’s profile — or Gamerscore — which is visible to anyone who cares to look.

Now imagine if you could earn an achievement for “doing 100 Windows Live searches, or doing a search that has no results for it, or doing a search that’ll return a Microsoft.com page in the #1 spot,” posits Scoble.

Frequent surfer programs have yet to catch any kind of wave.  Will a Frequent searcher program make a bigger splash?

Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales is birthing a new project — a community-driven “Google-killer” search engine. The project is an outgrowth of the Wikia camp [the for-profit company that Wales is chairman of], not a Wikipedia project [the separate community-driven encyclopedia he co-founded]. Wikia recently completed a funding round with Amazon, which is part of the Seattle “connection.”

According to Wales, “There are a lot of things that we’ve learned in the wiki world on how to get communities involved and engaged to build trusted networks in communities. A lot of the people who have tried to do this in the past have stumbled not on technical issues but on community issues … dmoz [The Open Directory] was too closed … that was their response because of the pressure of spammers … others have thought in terms of ranking algorithms. That’s not the right approach. The right approach allows for open dialog and debate and discussion.”
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