Google Velocity: Froogle and Local are dying while Video and Blog are surging
Written by Jeremy Crane (contact - e-mail) -- February 20th, 2007 | Share - Save - E-mailGoogle has been criticized for being unable to succeed beyond its core Web Search offering. Last year Forbes “graded Google” and didn’t give the internet superstar high marks beyond the core web search products. Just last week Forbes “re-graded Google” on the past year’s performance. At Compete we tend to look at things a bit myopically. We’re all about the data.
So to understand Google’s scholastic aptitude we looked at which currently available Google search properties were making the grade from a consumer driven data perspective.
Since January 2006 Google Web Search sessions have grown 23%. If you aggregate all of Google search sessions across all of their properties you get a year-over-year growth rate of 24%. This means that all non-Web search properties contributed only 1ppt to Google’s overall gains.
After rolling out over 15 targeted search services, Web Search continues to account for more than 95% of Google’s growth.
This isn’t to say that all of Google’s efforts haven’t been worthwhile. Several properties exhibit strong 13 month trends and should emerge as core Google properties in time.
To identify the winner and the losers, Compete categorized each Google property into three categories (Super Performers, Performers and Under Achievers) based on their 13-month growth trend. Compete indexed all sites to their session volume in Jan ’06. Index scores over 100 indicate proportional growth. Index scores under 100 indicated proportional decline.
Most of these high flyers are relative youngsters in the Google portfolio, but super stars none-the-less.
- Despite the YouTube acquisition, Google Video continues to grow and is one of Google’s most promising categories. That big spike in August? That’s when Google added Video to the homepage.
- Even if you don’t buy into the hype that Google Blog has surpassed Technorati the growth is undeniable as Google’s second fastest growing property.
- Google Scholar has had an interesting roller coaster ride since launching in late 2005. I’m very curious on what Scholar will grow in to considering Backrub was originally an academic tool.
The middle of the pack is made up of Google’s bread and butter services.
- Leading the group is Google Maps. This growth comes on the heels of Google essentially merging Local and Maps in late 2005.
- Toolbar search growth has been strong throughout 2006. This comes on the heels of a major effort by Google to bundle the toolbar with a variety of partners (e.g. Dell, Adobe, etc).
Did you ever see Michael Jordan play baseball? Long story short, it’s impossible to be good at everything… Google is no exception.
- Want to find truly in-market shoppers for just about any good sold online? You can’t throw a rock at a shopping engine without hitting one square in the wallet. The decline of Google’s shopping engine definitely makes one pause. I wonder where all those Froogle flee-ers are heading?
- Despite just about everyone in the search world chiming in on the shift to a more local web, Google Local took the biggest hit over the past year. To be fair this is mainly due to merger of Local and Maps. The growth in Maps more than offsets the decline in Local.
Next week we’ll be taking a look at Yahoo’s various services to see which received a thick peanut butter covering and which services came up a little thin. Stayed tuned.
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February 20th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Good info, but how about Gmail?
February 20th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
To say that the directory has dropped off when Google actively demoted it’s position…how does that relate to anything? Same with Froogle…they show less Froogle OneBox results and removed the homepage link to it, so they demoted it and usage dropped. And then with video they added a link to the homepage so it gained marketshare.
I think rather than tracking how consumers want to use Google these stats probably do a better job tracking how Google wants them to use Google.
February 20th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
In Hsieh: Absolutely, but for this cut we just looked at Google’s Search Properties. The full extent of Google is much broader than this. We’ll dive a little deeper into some of the other properties in the near future … gmail, checkout, to name a few.
aaron wall: I agree, the results that you see above definitely correlate very strongly with certain strategic decisions Google has made with regard to these properties. My point was that for the most part Google hits a lot of home runs but they also strike out. Maybe they strike out “on purpose” but I think the lack of promotion you note generally is the response to the strike out and not the causal factor.
JC
February 20th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
The potential ecommerce and local touch components lose while they had a logical shot at a differentiated revenue stream. Meanwhile, the over-heated, hard to pinpoint model in blog search and copyright fighting (video) do well.
Doesn’t seem to bode well for the finance department.
February 20th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
I don’t think they are really striking out though. They are looking for easy ways to add lots of value so they can extract lots of value. If there is limited user demand then why keep pushing it? Why not pull it back, fix it up or integrate it in another way that adds more value and thus has more demand?
They cycle many things through and instead of just promoting a few core verticals they now have many mini verticals integrated into search.
I guess one could argue cause and effect all day long, but a directory that duplicates another directory does not add much real value to the web, so they demoted it in favor of giving Wikipedia and other higher value reference sites more exposure.
You made the point of local and maps merging, but I believe that they want to integrate shopping (Froogle) into maps and local as best they can too, which means that when you look at the growth of Maps then Froogle does not look like such a dog.
February 20th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Don’t read so much into the drop off in ‘local’. It is simply the old name for maps and still remains up for legacy reasons as a cname. Inbound links are almost entirely to maps now, so the traffic was simply redirected. So local isn’t dying, as your title says.
February 21st, 2007 at 12:54 am
So what does that mean for your earlier report on Google Blog Search vs. Technorati? I can tell you that Technorati has been growing in leaps and bounds this year.
Inquiring minds want to know :-)
Dave
February 21st, 2007 at 8:17 am
@In Hsieh: “This means that all non-Web search properties contributed only 1ppt to Google’s overall gains.”
Jeremy, interesting analysis. I’m wondering if you could compare Froogle against Amazon.com and other retailers to see how they have done against each other over the last year. My point is that when people think “web search” they go to Google…and I feel like “product search” is in many ways now Amazon.com (and to a lesser extent secondary markets like eBay or craigslist).
To Aaron’s point, maybe that is why Google demoted it.
February 21st, 2007 at 8:18 am
Any word on Google Groups?
Google seems to have poured a fair amount of developer resources into moving Groups out of beta and updating the UI. It would be fascinating to know whether this was to juice a high-growth property or to rescue a laggard.
February 21st, 2007 at 10:14 am
Compete.com Blog » Google Velocity: Froogle and Local are dying while Video and Blog are surging
Jeremy Crane: “Most of these high flyers are relative youngsters in the Google portfolio, but super stars none-the-less. [...] Despite the YouTube acquisition, Google Video continues to grow and is one of Google’s most promising categories. That big…
February 22nd, 2007 at 9:10 am
David: I think the Technorati vs. Google Blog search horse race is definitely something we’ll be keeping tabs on going forward. There’s a number of different ways to measure success and by most of our measure Technorati is still leading the race. The growth of Google Blog Search is undeniable. For this investigation we didn’t breakout the properties and do competitive comparisons. We were just taking a narrow view of what’s going on at Google in a vacuum. To really understand how these properties stack up you need to fold in the market factors and competitive forces at play as well. So much analyze … so little time.
Ken: We’re definitely going to be diving deeper into Google’s competitive comparisons in the near future. Stay tuned …
Seth: Again … too little time … it’s on the radar and I just underlined it on my white board of blog topics to analyze.
Thanks for all the comments. keep ‘em coming.
February 25th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Jeremy, this was a great analysis, but it’s important to also consider the market potential of each service. For instance, Google Patent search is extremely valuable and will be successful, but its market is extremely limited compared to Google Video and Maps.
I know it’s tough to adjust these grades based on the market potential, but it’s worth highlighting.
February 26th, 2007 at 6:37 am
Just a quick observation regarding Google Scholar – it seems to track the (northern hemisphere’s) academic calendar. The troughs correspond nicely to the semester breaks in June-July and over the Christmas/ New Year period, and the peaks to the first half of each semester, when the students are actually reading (or at least locating) their course materials (in the second half of each semester, they’re more concerned with completing assessment, which usually has a set array of reading materials, largely available in the institution’s library).
March 23rd, 2007 at 12:04 pm
In the example above, the page header and intro text prints. I’m trying to suppress that as well.
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