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The home field advantage paid off: according to the latest data from comScore, the BBC website receives more visitors than Google News in the UK. For that matter, Yahoo News also ranked higher than Google News, by a margin of about 900,000 people.

Woe is Google, huh? In terms of numbers, it’s not even close to the top of the news site pile, and in terms of brand name, it has some less-than-distinguished company.

As Search Engine Watch’s Greg Jarboe reported, “The #1 site in the category was BBC News, with 7.8 million unique visitors. Yahoo News was #2, with 3.6 million unique visitors. Google News had 2.7 million, The Sun Online had 2.6 million, Guardian.co.uk had 2.5 million, MSN News had 2.4 million, AOL News had 1.9 million, and Times Online had 1.9 million.”

One name in that list stands out: Jarboe described the appearance of The Sun (Google’s closest neighbor in the rankings) as a “shocker.”

A quick visit to The Sun’s website justifies his dismay. Next to a small red “Breaking News” graphic, there is an article title: “Cops make arrest over letter bombs.” That plays second – or even third – fiddle to a story about Britney Spears, however, which is higher up on the page. Spears’s “adventurous” new hairstyle also merited much larger graphics and lettering.

With all the “to each his own” stuff aside, that’s not exactly the kind of company with which Google News wants to be neck-and-neck. Ah, well. The search engine giant can always turn back to comScore’s online properties rankings in the UK – it placed first in those.



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