Beyond the vaunted minimalist Google home page, the next nineteen Google domains barely account for 20 percent of visits to all things ending in Google.com.
Everyone knows Google is a popular online starting point. Bill Tancer at website intelligence firm Hitwise illustrated this in a recent blog post he made about the popularity of the top 20 Google domains.
In ranking 20 Google domains by market share, Tancer noted that for the period researched, the week ending May 13th, “the collection of Google properties continue to grow, in total, accounting for 4.3% of all Internet visits.”
The majority of those visits, nearly 80 percent, headed to Google’s main page, which attracts visitors like Disney World attracts tourists. The closest any other Google domain comes, 9.54 percent, is Google Image Search. Gmail, or Google Mail for our UK friends, brings in 5.51 percent of visits to Google domains.
After that, the numbers drop off the table. Google News is the only other domain with a full percentage point of visits, at 1.49 percent. Google Maps brings in 0.82 percent by Hitwise’s numbers.
The newly-launched Google Finance has not fared well according to Tancer:
Google Finance currently ranks 39th in the Business & Finance – Business Information category, with 0.29% market share of visits to the category, Yahoo! Finance in contrast, ranks #1 in the same category with 35.6% of market share
In fairness, Yahoo has a lengthy head start in the finance category. They’ll enhance that with their launching-soon Yahoo Finance Badges, which we reported on as they debuted at the Syndicate Conference.
Om Malik observed on his GigaOm blog that he felt “some of the newer offerings weren’t really sticking to the wall.” Turns out he was right, and he speculated on why that could be happening:
At the recent Google Press Day, I was intrigued by the continuous chanting of the “focus on search” and back to the basics of 70% mantra by the senior Google executives. I wondered to myself, well perhaps, a little fear of the big brother up north is making them circle the wagons a little.
Of course, Malik is referencing Microsoft as the primal growl instilling The Fear into Google, and he makes an excellent point in doing so.
We suggested another company needs to pay attention to The Fear, even if their CEO would rather not hear it.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
