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JonBenet Lycos searches increase 2000%

Coulda seen this coming.  JonBenet Ramsey has returned to the Lycos 50 at #30, for the week ending Aug. 19.  (The 50.lycos.com Web site, however, is showing results of the week ending Aug. 12.  Give 'em time.)

Interestingly, Yahoo's Buzz Index doesn't have JonBenet in its top rankings, and Google Trends shows only an uptick in interest for a few days.

“JonBenet pictures" is the most popular Ramsey-related query on Lycos, according to a news release.  "Search activity has increased 2,000 percent over the past 72 hours ... generating more queries than Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff combined," said Lycos.  Pamela Anderson fell to 2nd place, behind MySpace, after 9 weeks at the top. Her latest venture is PamelaPoker.com.

Disclaimer: I own shares of Yahoo and Google.

Web ratings: who can you trust?

Danny Sullivan, perhaps the Web's most search engine technology-savvy guy, is about to take a few pokes at two of the Internet's best-known audience monitoring services.  But first, he wants to quarrel with yesterday's report from ComScore Networks showing Google losing market share for the first time in almost a year.

Sullivan counsels caution. He pointed out it's not unheard of for ComScore to revise its numbers a month later, and make no announcement. And, anyway, Sullivan doesn't think a sparrow, or one month's numbers, makes a spring, or a failing company. Sullivan analyzes past ComScore research and concludes you should, wait for multi-month trends and compare data from multiple services.

Sullivan criticizes ComScore for making announcements which spin the numbers to garner press attention. He faults media for taking the bait. It's fair to say Hitwise and NetRatings do the same thing because, after all. They're not doing audience research just for the media. They want to sell that data, and more, to clients. So they want publicity.

Then, he writes. "In this story, I'm poking at ComScore. And later this week, I'll poke Hitwise and NetRatings."

Oh boy, cat fight. I can't wait.

Disclaimer: I own shares of Google.

Google trails AOL, Yahoo in usage time

Google (GOOG) seems to add a new service every week, but they don't appear to be keeping people on its sites for longer periods of time. Data released by Nielsen/NetRatings (NTRT) shows visitors to Google-branded sites in July spent less than an hour a month.  By comparison, AOL's (TWX) visitors were logged on 5 hours 35 minutes.  Yahoo's users were there 3 hours and 10 minutes.  (Here's the chart.)

In a report prepared for MarketWatch, NetRatings reported use of Google's Gmail was substantially less in July than similar services from Yahoo, AOL and MSN.  Yahoo's e-mail had the most visitors, 53 million, while Google had the least, 8.6 million.  Gmailers also spent less time with their e-mail than users of the Yahoo and AOL.

Similar behavior was seen with News.  Google was again 4th in audience, with about 9 million people, to  Yahoo's 1st place position, with 26.9 million.  Yahoo's news visitors stayed an average of 29 minutes during the month while Google's was accessed only 13 minutes. 

In other words, Google may have huge traffic, but NetRatings reports it's quick hits.  The Google visitor appears to behave like a "hunter", to use an image from Rob Becker's "Defending the Caveman", while AOL and Yahoo users are "gatherers."

This report should make Yahoo's (YHOO) CEO, Terry Semel feel more confident. He told Fortune's Adam Lashinsky, "The basic strategy was 'How broad can we build the audience by providing better products and services ... spending much more time focusing on depth, on deeper user experience."  Semel believes Yahoo's wider array of offerings will help it prevail, the magazine said.

Semel also touted Yahoo's buildup of its video infrastructure and says, "You can count on (us) taking video to the next step."  (Movie downloads soon?)

Disclaimer: I own shares of Google, Yahoo, and Time Warner