March 21, 2006

Google Finance Launched - is Google Travel Next?

I noticed John Battelle and Danny Sullivan's posts on Google Finance this morning and took a look at Hitwise to see how much traffic Google sends to Yahoo! Finance and to the Business and Finance sector as a whole.

Last week, 10% of UK visits from Google UK went to Business and Finance sites. Yahoo! Finance figured at the 499th site downstream from Google UK, receiving .02% of Google UK's traffic. With such a small percentage of visits going to Yahoo! Finance, why launch Google Finance? Something that John said in his blog caught my attention...

"Apparently this started as a 20% project in Google's Bangalore office, after Google consumer testing showed that the product was wanted by Google users.

"Well, OK then. I recall a fellow by the name of Jerry Yang and another by the name of Tim Koogle telling me that when they wanted to start a new publishing venture at Yahoo, they would watch what the users did after searching. Where the tracks were deepest - finance, sports, travel - they built a new section of the ....uh oh, here it comes...the PORTAL. "

I have included a table below that shows downstream visits from Google UK last week. Google's product development does seem to be filling gaps based on visits downstream from Google.

* 19.75% of visits go to Computers and Internet - this includes search engines, email, online communities, and image search. The obvious Google sites in this category are Google Images, Gmail, and Google.
* 13.63% of visits go to Shopping and Classifieds sites and Google Base and Froogle fall into this category.
* 10.58% of visits go to Entertainment sites and Google Video is categorised in the Entertainment - Multimedia sub-category.
* 10.07% go to Business and Finance and Google has just launched Google Finance.
* 8.94% go to Google Travel.
* 5.78% go to Education with Google Scholar the top Google site in this category.
* 5.45% go to Lifestyle - with Google's Blogger the top Google site in the category.
* 4.61% go to News and Media with Google News long-established.

The last category I'll mention is Sports, receiving 2.40% of visits from Google, and Google recently launched Joga with Nike Football.

A quick review of this list makes me think that Google Travel, rumoured to be called "Troogle" may not be far off.

Downstream Categories from Google UK, Week ending 18 March 2006

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 01:23 AM
Posted to Search

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Comments

Posted by: Daniel King at March 21, 2006 06:26 AM

Posted by: Brian J at March 22, 2006 06:54 AM

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