In the US, people are searching for "discount" tires, furniture, hotels, airfare, auto parts, and shoes, mostly, but want "cheap" tickets, flights, textbooks, and car rentals.

If they’re looking for "prices" specifically, they’re specifically looking for gas, gold, cars, stocks, silver, oil, and live stock. But if it’s a "deal" they want, they want it at the last minute on travel, on cell phones, on hotels, on cruises, and trips to Las Vegas.

Anything "used" is reserved for cars, books, trailers, boats, and auto parts.

But my favorite are the "free" things. Searchers want free music, games, MySpace layouts, ringtones, credit reports, and sex stories.

Sex stories? Really? What, is the guy at the gym, or by the water cooler, or in your fantasy football group charging now to tell of his weekend exploits? 

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

Bill Tancer of Hitwise loves data. They love it so much at Hitwise that the ILoveData.com domain leads straight to their analysts’ blogs.

Among the big search engines, Tancer said Google continues to grow market share. The search leader has been ticking along at a 24.3 percent clip. Yahoo’s fortunes have improved, with traffic rising since April 2007.

At Microsoft, it’s a tale of two brands. The Live.com brand has been picking up a little market share, while the MSN Search name is in a small decline.

Tancer provided a look at just how dominant the top three search sites are over the competition. Out of some 1,600 search engines they track, Hitwise found 80 percent of search goes through the top three: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

James Lamberti of comScore Networks had an out of left field suggestion for which site could be the fourth-biggest, if it were measured as a search engine. MySpace has reached a point where it would nudge aside Ask and AOL, both of which round out the top five search engines.

Jon Stewart of Nielsen//NetRatings looked at how search market share has become distributed in the US. Google has over half, at 53 percent, while Yahoo gets 20 percent of searches made. Microsoft follows at 14 percent.

He also provided a cautionary suggestions to online retailers. Pushing the conversion too hard, either immediately on arriving or shortly before a purchase, puts a conversion at risk. There should be some time spent on building the brand, with quality content and other efforts, as an investment in retaining a customer.

But Hitwise UK’s Heather Hopkins has constructed a Zeitgeist-like list of “how to” searches, and this is definitely worth checking out.

UK "How To" Searches Focus On CVs

Hopkins begins by noting that there are differences between US and UK search habits. 

For example, her colleague, Bill Tancer, found that a lot of Americans are curious about “how to tie a tie,” while the British apparently aren’t; the Brits are more concerned with “how to write a cv,” or “résumé,” as it’s more commonly known in the US. 

Yet it’s interesting that both of these queries are conceivably part of the job search and interview process.

Other UK “how to”s were much less related to a business environment; “how to have sex” ranked second, and the similarly sexual “how to kiss” was number five.

Going off in another direction, “how to get a six pack” and “how to lose weight” came in at numbers four and eight, respectively, while the financially oriented “how to make money” ranked sixth.

Yet Hopkins suspects that these queries are all related, writing, “Essentially, we want to become rich . . . and attractive . . . in order to procreate.”  Sounds reasonable – that’s more or less the Hollywood-ized American (and/or British) dream, right?

Anyway, “how to” and “how to get to” were third and tenth on Hopkins’s list, and I have no idea what British searchers were trying to achieve with those fragmented phrases.  As another strange point of interest, Tancer discovered that many Americans are interested in “how to levitate.”  Go figure.

And there you have it; the only remaining “how to” search from the UK’s top ten was “how to save a life lyrics,” and as Hopkins writes, “How to Save a Life” is a song by The Fray that was played on episodes of both "Scrubs" and "Grey’s Anatomy."

By the way – I feel compelled to admit that I’m among those who’ve run a “how to tie a tie” search.  But with my confession comes an explanation: I only wear those decorative nooses every three or so years, and like Google’s Peter Fleischer (and Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan), I hate ‘em.

That may be due to a combination of issues, said Bill Tancer of Hitwise. His assessment of the Xbox 360′s newfound appeal may be driven by several factors:

So what is driving the increase in searches for Xbox 360? It appears to be a combination of hype for new games, rumours of a price drop and no doubt some queries about the recent problems.

Such interest could be good news for Microsoft, which would welcome it. Microsoft had to incur a billion-dollar charge to fix defective Xbox 360s.

“We often find that Internet searches are a leading indicator and can be predictive of future sales growth,” said Tancer. Any company likes to find positive sales indicators heading into the holiday season.

People have been especially interested in a potential Xbox 360 price drop. Tancer said the top phrase searched for along with ‘price drop’ over the past four weeks has been the Xbox 360. “There were 70% more US searches for

 Don’t worry, he doesn’t list all of them there. He does, though, if you like learning the origin of phrases, go into where the phrase "There’s no such thing as a free lunch" comes from.

The most popular of the free queries were searches for free games, music, and ringtones. Well, that’s the family friendly version.

The Skinemax version is that most of time, freeloaders are looking for sex, sex stories, sex videos, and sex pics. These may also want to do a search on "free virus protection," while they’re at it.

If memory serves, though, free ringtones, games and wallpaper are dangerous queries, too.

As you might expect, free shipping is most popular around the holidays, and free games, chat and movies are more in demand during the lazy summers.

Here are a couple of other idiomatic origins, just for good measure:

You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
 

Hitwise’s Bill Tancer released a report showing the change in visits to the search engine company’s top properties; while some went down, others went up.  Google Maps and YouTube were among the lucky ones, showing improvements of 20.34% and 8.26%, respectively.

Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz explains why.  “Google Maps saw a 20% increase in traffic because prior to Universal search, Google only displayed map results for a very limited set of queries,” he writes.  “Now, Google Maps results are far more common and take up to three of the seven web search results.”

Similarly, “Prior [to Google Universal Search], YouTube videos were not shown in Google’s web search results.”

But other Google properties weren’t so lucky; visits to Google Book Search went down 19.44%, and Google News’s numbers decreased by 7.84%.  As for Google Image Search, Schwartz notes, “Image search took a 7.22% dive, most likely because the image one box results were no longer guaranteed to be displayed at the top.  Image search results now can be found at the bottom, middle or top of the results.”

I think it’s likely that most of the world is indifferent to Google Universal Search.  But within the Googleplex, certain teams have almost undoubtedly noticed these big changes due to its launch.

Google Image Search came next, with 9.20%. While that share may seem like it suffered from a huge dropoff, it’s also unavoidable. Tancer included 33 Google properties in his report, and, well, there are only 100 percentage points to go around.

Thomas Hawk also viewed Tancer’s Hitwise statistics, and concluded, “It’s amazing to me that Google is not doing a better job with image search given how important a chunk of business that it represents for them.” Hawk went on to document his experience with the service; it seems that Google Image Search isn’t very good at finding pictures of monkeys.

Continuing down the Hitwise list, Gmail fans should be proud that it managed to pull down a share of 5.44%. Google Video followed with 1.53%, Google News claimed 1.29%, and everything else was at less than 0.80%. The recently deceased Google Answers placed 20th (the rankings were for the week ending November 25), with only a 0.05% share.

That last fact has led to some interesting thoughts. Phil Bradley writes that it’s “interesting to note that Google Answers is at #20, with a bunch of other resources below that, such as Picasa and Groups 2. Are those going to get canned as well? I don’t think so for a moment, but it’s Friday, which means that idle speculation is allowed.”

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

Google Hasn’t Surpassed Yahoo Completely

While Google is the Wall Street darling, with stock projected to rise as high as $750 (some have timidly suggested as high as $840), and with a search market share somewhere between 40 and 60 percent, Hitwise’s Bill Tancer says that not only will it take longer than a year, but much has to be assumed, lost, and gained to get Google past Yahoo and to the number one online property.

Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney, based on numbers provided by comScore projected that Google would overcome a 20-million visitor deficit, supplanting Yahoo as the top spot, if current growth rates continued.

Tancer chewed that over using Hitwise numbers and came to a different conclusion. Though Yahoo’s market share has dropped by 10 percent in the last year, and Google’s has risen by 18.6 percent, Tancer estimates it will take three years for Google to catch up with Yahoo.

Click for Larger Image

“If we apply those growth rates, and assume no material changes in those rates over the next three years (a big assumption), Google would not surpass Yahoo! in market share of visits until mid-2009,” writes Tancer.

What will make Yahoo difficult to overcome is how the traffic is spread out among Yahoo properties. A third of Yahoo traffic goes to Yahoo Mail. Another third goes to Yahoo.com, and just under 11 percent are using Yahoo Search.

The traffic dispersed among the top 20 Yahoo properties is double the traffic dispersed among top 20 Google properties. At the top of Google’s list is, of course, search, gathering 87 percent of Google traffic. The rest are spread out to the hundredths of a percent among all Google properties.

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We made it our feature story. Apparently I’m the only one who didn’t care. As it turns out, I should’ve. Hitwise’s Bill Tancer weighs in today after discovering how promoting Google Video to the homepage transformed somewhere out there into a click frenzy.

Google Video traffic doubled.

“From another perspective,” says Tancer. “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.”

That boosted Google Video up two spots, from 5 to 7, among the company’s most trafficked services, and busted Froogle down two ranks, from 7 to 5.

We may see Google Video go higher yet as it becomes what David Utter described as Google’s “bigger boat”:

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