While Web 2.0 junkies may talk about Google Maps all the time (and, once in a while, other innovative companies, too), MapQuest remains the untouchable king of online maps. Well, MapQuest is finally un-untouchable (touchable? nonuntouchable? ~untouchable? untouchable-less?), thanks to Google Maps more than doubling its market share over the last year, rocketing past a slipping Yahoo Maps to seize a strong second place.
Google was up 135% in 2007, while MapQuest traffic was flat over the last year. Google’s change in its search results to only show links to Google Maps, and not MapQuest, pushed so much traffic to Google’s own mapping product that it made all the difference in market share. In fact, the change was so quick and dramatic that Google may be up 135%, but it is only up 7% in the last six months (the change occured in March).
Right now, MapQuest owns 50.25% of the market, down 2-4 percentage points in the last twelve months. Google, meanwhile, has 22.2% market share, up from around 10%. Yahoo fell from just under 20% to 13.34%, and Windows Live Maps was mostly flat, finishing up perhaps a small fraction of a percent.
Thomsom, maker of GE-branded telephones, has teamed up with Google to release a number of GE phones with a prominent GOOG-411 button above the keypad. Pressing the button will call Google’s toll free voice controlled business search service. With every consumer who buys one of these phones most likely becoming a serious user of GOOG-411 (really, who would use any other service if the button is right on their phone?), this could me some serious uptake in usage of Google’s service.
Great partership for Google, and it really shows how serious they are in making GOOG-411 a success.
Check out the Ustream page or watch it here, I’m broadcasting now. We’ll be looking at some pictures I took last night, then we can talk about any topic anyone brings up. After that, I’ll try to get in a product review, maybe look at the Centro (finally!).
Here’s the video. If you want to say something to me, the chat box is there for you (or you can do it even easier on the Ustream page). There are already 27 viewers, so it should be fun.
Google Invents New Way To Game Popular Searches
Google has made a big mistake in the way it treats popular searches. Ionut Alex figured out that Google isn’t just indexing new pages faster than ever before, it is changing the search results when a search term spikes and hits Google Hot Trends. If Google sees unusual activity on a search term, it will start promoting recently created web pages in order to give those searches the latest news on the topic.
Since Google Hot Trends shows the spiking searches of the day, spammers have figured out that the easiest way to get free traffic is to just write about stuff that makes Hot Trends, spamming up the search results with meaningless crap. I know that I just have to tell you how much I love Mike Holmgren, want to go into the cathouse, and have no idea who Marcus Trufant is, and I’ll get extra traffic.
The combination of Hot Trends and the new page promotion is ruining search results, and Google needs to fix it. In the future, how about only promoting authoritative websites, like those in Google News and popular in Google Reader? It’s a start.
Google News Archive Improves
Google News Archive added a timeline view, which shows you when a search term had more or less news about it. As Ionut says, you wind up with a meaningful webpage that shows you the history of a term and its news coverage over the last several hundred years.
Magellan GPS Integrates Google Local
Magellan is introducing at CES their Maestro Elite 5340+GPRS, a new GPS that connects to the cellular network. It uses that capability to connect to Google Local, letting users search for local businesses while driving and get relevant search results from Google. That means that not only can this GPS connect to its satellite as usual to say where you are, but to the internet to search for “pizza” or other stores, without the GPS maker having to compile a huge (and immediately out of date) list of every business in the country. That becomes Google’s job.
Panasonic Building YouTube/Picasa Connecting TVs
Also at CES, Panasonic announced it will start developing televisions that can connect to YouTube and Picasa Web Albums and view videos and pictures shared on those services. Consumers will even be able to edit and share their Picasa albums, right from the television set.
Wikia Search Releases, To, Uh, What’s The Opposite Of Fanfare?
Wikia search, the wiki-based search engine from the creator of Wikipedia, has launched in an early alpha version. A lot of reports are completely unimpressed with it, given that, as with any wiki, there are a ton of pages with no information or just bare-bones summaries, probably a lot like what Wikipedia looked like when it first launched. I expect Wikia to be a failure, but at least give it time before making the declaration that it already is.
Greg Linden Predicts The End Of It All
Finally, Greg Linden, formerly of Amazon.com and Findory, is predicting that 2008 is going to be the second dot-com crash of the internet age, and it will be longer and deeper than 2000’s crash. It’s the boldest and biggest prediction I’ve heard anyone make this year, and I hope he’s wrong. I fear he’s right. The economic indicators are already there. If things start slipping with the tech companies, the online advertising industry will start to sink, and even if Google stays strong, its earnings will slip with it.
Congratulations! Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny, active blogger and flying enthusiast, got married Tuesday on the beach in Zanzibar. He’s uploaded a few pics to Flickr, and I wish the best to the happy couple. Enjoy whatever time you have off before returning to Yahoo. Marriage is a wonderful thing, and it should be savored. Looks like Jeremy got a good one there; don’t let her go.
Charles Trippy created the longest video ever uploaded to YouTube, clocking in at an astonishing nine hours, 15 minutes, but still finishing under YouTube’s 100-megabyte limit (with massive compression). That’s less than 180 kilobytes per minute, a bitrate less than 3 kilobytes per second. Assuming 30 frames per second, then each frame is just a hundred bytes. Oy.
Anyway, the video is very long, and I (and no one on Earth) don’t have the patience to watch it, but it looks like there’s a lot going on. Check it out, watch what you can.
