SEO Blog

I just had the chance to read through a bunch of comments left on the blog with regards to the last post I did. Thank-you very much for all the feedback, and comments. I’ve also deleted quite a few MSFT bashing posts. For those of you who wrote them, you missed the point - I probably should have pointed you to some of my older comments. I’m not bashing MSN; just reporting on a surprising trend.

I’ve met a quite a few MSFT employees, and a few like Ken Moss and Chris Payne from MSN Search. They get search, and believe that they will build an engine which will beat out Google hands down. I believe that someday, they will. I think MSFT needs to become stronger in the search market, and it will.

I posted about 98052, because that that was the first zip requested. I’ve had quite a few others requested, some through the comments, and some through regular email, and I will post about those zip codes over the next few weeks.

A few weeks ago I posted a comment about daily search traffic trends, from an aggregate sampling of the web sites we are tracking.

Saturday night, I was discussing search trends with Rick Segal, via Skype. Looking at Rick’s travel schedule, we were probably in the same building at the time! We were discussing some of the coming features and advances in the to be released, patent-pending, search metrics technology that Metamend has been developing. As an aside, I mentioned that it’s interesting to compare how people search from within different zip codes; for example 90210 vs 90205.

We laughed and said that there’s lots of places which would be interesting to examine. I could just post what interests me, but why not let me know which places interest you? Help me out, by sending me the zip codes for some interesting places, (i.e. area 51 !! - what’s the zip code there?), and I’ll try to post some information as soon as possible.

In the meantime; Rick started it off by suggesting that I take a look at a bunch of sites’ search data from 98052, so here it is;

Just saw a note at Threadwatch, that Think Partnership has signed a Letter of Intent to purchase Ice Rocket. For the full story I went to Yahoo’s business news section. There’s still a number of hurdles to cross, and no amount was specified.

I like IceRocket. I think Blake Rhodes has done a great job there. The engine is usually quite accurate, but I have noticed that new blog posts have been slower to get added lately. It used to be a lot faster at adding new posts than Technorati, but now lags noticeably behind. It’s still faster than Google Blog Search. Accuracy wise, it’s still excellent.

It will be interesting to watch what happens to Ice Rocket as it moves forward with Think.

According to the New York Times, “about 11 million of Orkut’s more than 15 million users are registered as living in Brazil — a remarkable figure given that studies have estimated that only about 12 million Brazilians use the Internet from home. ”

Hmmmm…

Most people I speak to don’t know about Google’s social networking site, Orkut. (Most users are in Brazil, and I haven’t been there in a very long, long time). Assuming that 11/12 (or 92%) of Brazilian Internet users actually use the tool, that would be a phenomenal adoption rate. Surprisingly, when I check the reporting on a few social network sites we’re tracking, and look at just search queries originating in Brazil, here’s the market leaders:

1   Google-BR         66.93%
2   Google              15.91%
3   Google Local       7.95%
4   Google Maps        4.03%

So I guess 92% penetration is possible…

That said, why would Orkut have taken off that well in Brazil, and yet no where else? As it’s an invitation only network, I’ve never really looked into it, perhaps a reader can tell me why Orkut is that much more addictive than other excellent social networking sites like Insider Pages, (which if it ever entered the Brazilian market would undoubtably do well), Tribe, Judy’s Book, or Craigslist?