Following is a look at the fastest growing search terms according to Compete, for the top five search engines. You’ll notice that this list is largely dominated by brand names.

Some key findings shard by Compete include:

- Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter, and YouTube have seen explosive traffic growth in the past year and to follow suit their query volumes have grown substantially

- While portal properties Yahoo! (141MM Uvs) and AOL (55MM Uvs) haven’t significantly grown in traffic, they have seen 50%+ increase in brand queries since last year

- No sharp traffic trends in webmail properties Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, but brand terms for both of these properties have risen sharply

Now look at this other chart that shows the top five search terms to some of these brand sites.

It’s pretty telling, is it not? I would guess that a lot of this stems from users having search on either their home page or right on their browser. It’s easier to type "facebook" than to type "facebook.com" (granted, not by much, but humans are a lazy species). For that matter (at least in Firefox) if you type "facebook" into the address bar, it brings you up a list of search results anyway, then you are just a click away from facebook.com.

You better make sure you rank number one for your brand, or you just might be losing traffic to the site that is.

And, you pay a lot to experience the pain of surfing the mobile Web. Lewis Ward, an analyst at the International Data Corporation, compares the mobile Web today to AOL before it went with flat-rate pricing in the early 1990s. Most people surf on a pay-per-kilobyte model, which encourages them to surf as fast as they can, he says."

An article out from the New York Times entitled "Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far" talks about how disappointing the mobile web experience has largely been for consumers thus far.

While I can only speak as one U.S. consumer using one U.S. web based phone (the iPhone), I will chalk the internet browsing experience on my iPhone after several months now as an abject failure.

As much as I love the iPhone, and it is the best mobile phone I’ve ever used, the web browsing on it leaves so much to be desired. AT&T’s sucky "Edge" network is not worth using at all. Unless you are really in a pinch and absolutely must get somethign from the web it simply is not worth using.

When I got my iPhone I thought that browsing the web was one of the big things that I’d be doing with it. I do not do this at all.

A case in point. I whip out my iPhone as I’m heading up the escalator at the West Oakland BART station and try to go to a web page. There is no train at the landing yet. The iPhone fires up like it’s going to load but then it just moves so slow. Maybe a minute later the train arrives. I hop in. My page still has not loaded. The train pulls forward. It’s probably a good half mile and maybe another minute and a half before the train pulls into the tunnel that goes under the Bay (where I lose all internet access). Still no web page loads.

Now I’m under the Bay after about 3 minutes or so of waiting and I’ve given up. After about 5 days in a row of this performance I simply stop trying to use my iPhone on the way to work. This is disappointing because I would like to have read an article on the iPhone on my way to work during the 8 minutes or so I’m under the Bay in the BART tunnel.

While it is true that you can use wi-fi with the iPhone this is kind of stupid. Why? Because in general it’s too much work to screw around trying to find unsecure wifi spots to use. In the few places (like home) where you *know* you have wifi, you don’t need to be on your iPhone when your MacBook Pro is a much more suitable way to browse the web.

Yes, there is the occasional occurrence when you are standing in North Beach and want to call the sushi restaurant to inquire about dinner and you’re willing to wait the 3 minutes plus to get the phone number on your iPhone. But as for general web surfability? I’d rather surf my first ever AOL dial up connection than AT&T’s "Edge" network.

And it’s a big disappointment to me that the iPhone disappoints so much in terms of internet useage as this is something that I was actually very much looking forward to doing with it when I shelled out the $700 to buy it in the first place.

And before you say $700 – $100 (generous rebate gift certificate sort of thing back) = $600 not $700, not in my case. Apple’s "generous" $100 rebate code didn’t work for me in the store when I tried to use it and I’ve yet to get around to trying to figure out who to deal with on that one.

Comment …

Mobile Posse and Acuity Mobile have ideas that would put more ads in front of wireless phone users, without using the conventional text or banner ad unit we see on PC browsers all the time.

A Google spokesperson hinted the search advertising company wouldn’t go this route with mobile advertising. From the report:

A Google executive wouldn’t give a definitive answer about the search giant’s interest in mobile pop-up ads, but he seemed to be leaning against it. “We have looked at a variety of models,” said Dilip Venkatachari, director of product management responsible for mobile monetization efforts at Google. “The formats we deploy now and in the future are all around things we think are least intrusive and deliver value.”

Another executive, Jeff Janer with Third Screen, also cast pop-up ads in a negative light. He suggested annoying people with ads could lead to subscriber churn for a wireless provider.

That’s probably less of a concern than Janer believes. Many people have contracts with their mobile providers that carry hefty termination fees for canceling them early.

Aside from those fees, very few mobile devices offer a web-browsing experience that justifies the usually expensive add-on fee for data access each month. Apple’s iPhone might be the first to really approach the experience-side of the issue well.

On the pricing side, we’ll keep looking for someone (perhaps Google) to turn this issue on its ear through the deployment of a consumer-oriented wireless network.

This could be very useful for applications that connect with the internet, like browsers (including mobile browsers, which are less well protected) and email clients, or for web applications to deny access to code originating on an “evil” site. You could probably close a lot of cross-site vulnerabilities just by taking advantage of Google’s API to block anything from a bad neighborhood.

Two things to be aware of if you want to use the API in your project: The API key is only good for 10,000 active users, so if you expect more, you’ll need to talk with Google. Also, Google wants your software to re-download the list of bad sites every 30 minutes, and you are not allowed to use the list to warn users unless it has been updated within the last 30 minutes. That last one is a bit peculiar; does Google update the list on a massive basis multiple times per day? That’s kind of shocking, but pretty comforting as well.

* – General Badware would be a great name for a band

Comments

Tag:

The paper, written by Kristina Lerman at USC and Laurie Jones at Mills College, looks at how views, faves, and comments are generated at Flickr.

Their conclusion?

Reverse contacts (how many people have made you a contact on Flickr) count more than anything else. Their research would also indicate that both tags and groups have much less influence over having your photo viewed. They do recognize the significance of having one of your images appear in Flickr’s Explore section as being dramatic, especially views coming from users outside one’s social network, but still conclude that the number of reverse contacts that you have would seem to be the single most important factor to "success," at least as defined by views, faves, comments, etc., on Flickr.

An interesting read.

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Nearly two in five (39%) adult US internet users have browsed housing listings online, up from 34 percent in 2004 and 27 percent in 2000. A much greater percentage, 77 percent, of homebuyers used the internet for research purposes, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Of all internet users, 27 percent have looked online for housing information, twice the number that had done so in 2000. Age, or lack thereof, is the greatest factor associated with online housing research, which also indicates a growth market as the youth come of home buying or renting age.

Over half of young adults ages 18-29 have searched online for housing information, compared to 43 percent of users 30-49, 27 percent of users ages 50-64; and 15 percent of users ages 65 and older.

The number of people that have taken virtual tours is also up; 51 percent have done this, up from 45 percent two years ago. Nearly a third have visited a classified ad site like Craigslist.

As this becomes the norm in the next few years, now is a great time to start planning some sort of marketing effort to target these folks on a local level, especially for those who operate a brick-and-mortar store or business near these locations.

Wouldn’t make sense to strike a deal with listing sites and realtors to include businesses in or around these neighborhoods, or to offer online coupons valid if someone buys or rents there?

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Text advertising still gets attention, as evidenced by ClickZ’s reference to a Nielsen Norman Group study on the topic. (Nielsen as in usability guru Jakob Nielsen, not the ratings service Google has on schedule to crush in the future.) Graphical ads haven’t been noticed nearly as well.

Google’s twelve-digit market capitalization may have been a hint too. Or the popularity of the Adblock extension in Firefox. Or Opera’s new content blocker.

Internet users have been focusing more on the content and less on the ads, if at all. Banner ads get no love from those users. ClickZ cited Nielsen Norman Group research director Kara Pernice Coyne, who said text and contrasting colors in a graphical ad kept simple is less likely to be disregarded.

The Internet Advertising Bureau dismissed the study out of hand:

Stuart also cited the cost effectiveness of online advertising. He didn’t mention another aspect of it that give online ads an edge over their big media commercial counterparts; online advertising can be measured to see just how effective it is for the marketer.

—
Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

North Carolina-based UpSNAP just launched a sweepstakes…

People can enter to win the grand prize drawing once per day by signing up for free online at www.upsnap.com/sweepstakes.htm. Sweepstakes entrants can also receive a free horoscope sent to their mobile phone and explore all of UpSNAPs free and premium SMS services. When participants sign up with UpSNAP, each day they use UpSNAPs services they automatically get an additional entry submitted.

Where did I put my cell phone.

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Today Uche Enuha posts and gathers more than 80 comments. On what? Deleting browsing history. You know there’s a lot of interest in IE when it gathers that many comments on what most of us would think is a rudimentary feature.

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

Dr. Szell: Is it safe?
-- Marathon Man, 1976

Maybe not, Christian. Nitesh Dhanjani posted some concerns he has about the Google Safe Browsing plug-in for Firefox.

Every request made while using the plug-in goes to Google. Dhanjani tested a legit site and a phishing site, intercepted the traffic, and observed that behavior. The first problem comes with the data being sent to Google:

Clear-text means plain, easy-to-read text. Dhanjani writes that if a web application is set up to send your information to a site with a GET request instead of a POST, and someone is sitting on the network between the user and Google with a packet sniffer, they can easily see your credit card number or any other personal information.

GET figures in Dhanjani’s second issue with the plug-in:

So even if no malicious parties are camping out on the wire and sniffing that information, it’s still traveling in the clear to Google. Typical uses won’t know if their bank or credit card company uses GET or POST for web applications; Dhanjani believes a lot of web applications don’t use POST.

Let’s hope a few people in banking and financial IT pick up on this and check out their applications. Is it safe?

Add to | Yahoo My Web

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.