When Google Blog Search launched last year, I wondered if it would surpass Technorati in market share of visits. This week Hitwise data show that the market share of visits to Google Blog Search surpassed visits to Technorati for the week ending 12/23/06. Google Blog Search began catching up to Technorati in October, when Google placed a link to Blog Search on the Google News home page, causing a 168% surge in market share for Google Blog Search over a two week period (week ending 10/14/06 vs. week ending 10/28/06). Since then, approximately 60% of Google Blog Search’s traffic has been coming directly from Google News, compared to less than 1% before the change. Blogger Blog Search has been receiving about the same amount of traffic as Technorati, although it has dropped since Google Blog Search took off. Sphere, another blog search service, is still small, but growing.

Last week (week ending 12/23/06) visits to Google Blog Search experienced an increase of 14%, but the percentage of upstream traffic from Google News dropped. The chart below shows an increase in upstream traffic from Google, and that Google Images, Google Video and Google Groups showed up out of nowhere as top ten sources of traffic for Google Blog Search. I believe this increased traffic is due to the prominent placement of “Blogs” in the “more>>” box shown in the screen shot below.


The Google home page and SERP have always been the key distribution point for Google’s other services, as we have shown before in the case of Google Book Search and Google Video. I have often wondered how people who don’t read the industry press find out about Google’s growing array of services, including Finance, Calendar, and Base. It seems to me that Google’s delay in promoting its new services can prevent those services from being formidable competitors in their respective verticals, because only the geekiest folks know about them. What’s the point of putting the sharpest engineers on projects to build the sharpest web tools, only to have them flounder on Google’s ever-expanding product page? In the case of Google Blog Search, maybe waiting wasn’t such a bad idea, as it did receive poor reviews when it was first released.
Hitwise Demographic data show that Google Blog Search has attracted a younger audience than Technorati. Only 10% of visitors to Technorati were in the 18-24 age group, while 34% of visitors to Google Blog Search reached that tech-savvy group. What’s interesting about Google Blog Search’s younger skew is that Google News, like most general news sites, skews older, with only 15% of its visitors in the 18-24 group. This could indicate that the younger users of Google News are much more likely to click on the “search blogs” link than the older users. In contrast, Technorati has been doing very well with the 45 and up web users. Both sites skew male, with 55% of Technorati visitors and 61% of visitors to Google Blog Search.