Saw this post from Steve Rubel that alerted me to the fact that Google changed the links above its main search box yesterday (Wednesday), removing Froogle and replacing it with Video. As the links on Google’s home page don’t change very often, this is a great opportunity to understand the distribution power of Google’s front page.
Since our data updates everyday, this evening I was able to pull the following chart which shows the market share of visits (compared to all U.S. internet visits) for the two affected sites, video.google.com and www.froogle.com. The increase demonstrates that the link more than doubled Google Video’s traffic yesterday.

From another perspective, I looked at the percentage traffic that Google’s home page sent to the Video page before and after the link change. The chart below shows that Google Video’s traffic from the homepage surged from 50% to 70% in a single day.

Wednesday’s change moved Google Video into the #5 position in the Google Breakdown, while Froogle moved from the #5 to the #7 position.