Yesterday morning (prior to the deal being announced) I presented on the Search Engine Landscape Panel at SES San Jose. During the second half of my presentation, I discussed the opportunity/threat that MySpace poses to the search engines, primarily Google.
In January of this year, Google received a little over 4% of their traffic from MySpace in our U.S. sample. As of the week ending July 29th, that percentage has grown to almost 11%, making MySpace the #1 upstream site for Google. Here’s the chart from my presentation that shows the trend of traffic from MySpace to Google from Google’s perspective.

Since over the last year there has been no formal relationship between the two companies, this high volume of traffic flowing from MySpace to Google would most likely be the result of users using their Google toolbar or manually navigating to Google while engaged in their MySpace session. It would seem that this represents a great opportunity for Google to monetize a portion of that audience through AdSense listings and increase search traffic through greater exposure on MySpace.