Since Google Base launched last November, many have speculated on the threat it poses to eBay, Craigslist and other classifieds sites. By examining Hitwise Clickstream data by industry, we can see which categories of sites people are visiting after Google Base, thus getting an indication of what kind of content is being searched for on the site. For the month of March, Shopping & Classifieds was the largest downstream category, with Rewards & Directories site Shop.com accounting for 5.1% of downstream traffic from Google Base. So yes, it looks like people are interested in shopping when they go to Google Base.

An additional 15% of Google Base users went back to Google or another search engine in March, and another 13% went to recipe sites (Food & Beverage). Automotive sites accounted for 8.2% of downstream traffic, and auto classifieds sites accounted for the majority of the automotive downstream traffic. Job listings also appear to be a popular use of Google Base, with employment sites accounting for nearly 8% of its downstream traffic. Average session time was fairly brief, at just under 6 minutes for the month of March. So what is Google Base? Part shopping directory, part recipe search service, part classified service. It remains to be seen which of these services will take hold with Google Base users.
Hitwise market share data shows that Google Base, after a fairly strong start, received approximately the same market share of visits for the week ending April 1, 2006 that it did a month after launch. The January increase shown in the chart below can be attributed to the yearly increase in visits to Employment sites after the start of the New Year. The week ending January 14 was the peak for visits to the Employment & Training category, and 16.7% of Google Base’s downstream visits went to Employment & Training websites during that week, more than double the number sent to the category in March 2006.