February is always a weird month for search data.

It’s a short month. Query volume is always down. And this year was particularly odd with all the snowstorms. Were people on the Internet more or less as a result?

An interesting note in comScore’s rankings for last month is that Facebook search query was actually UP. So, there’s one thing people like to do when it snows. (I think we all knew that already by the sheer number of snow pictures uploaded by people in our network.)  Read more... (171 words, 3 images, estimated 41 secs reading time)

According to comScore Video Metrix, nearly 173 million U.S. Internet users watched 32.4 billion videos in January 2010. Do the math and you’ll discover that viewers watched an average of 187 videos per viewer during the month.

If you drill down into the data, you also see that 135.4 million viewers watched 12.7 billion videos on YouTube, which is an average of 93.4 videos per viewer. It also represents an increase of 50 percent versus year ago.  Read more... (327 words, 2 images, estimated 1:18 mins reading time)

comScore has just announced its monthly qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In January 2010, Americans conducted 15.2 billion core searches.

Google Sites accounted for 9.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (375 million).

Yes, yes, we all knew that Google accounted for 65.4 percent search market share. But Microsoft has grabbed 11.3 percent market share.

But, if you scroll down the press release, you’ll see that there were 3.7 billion “extended searches” conducted on YouTube. What’s an extended search? It’s a search that takes place on a site other than the five search engines mentioned above.  Read more... (187 words, 2 images, estimated 45 secs reading time)

Five years ago in February 2005, according to legend, the idea of YouTube was born after Chad Hurley and Steve Chen experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco.

Four years ago in February 2006, according to data from Hitwise, YouTube emerged as the market leader from the scrum of online video sites — and six months later I was part of a team that uploaded our first video to YouTube to promote “Hostage: The Jill Carroll Story” for The Christian Science Monitor.  Read more... (803 words, 2 images, estimated 3:13 mins reading time)

comScore has just released a study on growth in the global search market in 2009. The study revealed that the U.S. remains the largest search market worldwide, while Google Sites retains a commanding position in the global search market.

More than 131 billion searches were conducted worldwide in December 2009, a 46-percent increase in the past year. This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute.  Read more... (279 words, 2 images, estimated 1:07 mins reading time)

comScore has just released a study on growth in the global search market in 2009. The study revealed that the U.S. remains the largest search market worldwide, while Google Sites retains a commanding position in the global search market.

More than 131 billion searches were conducted worldwide in December 2009, a 46-percent increase in the past year. This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute.  Read more... (279 words, 2 images, estimated 1:07 mins reading time)

VEVO is a new online entertainment network started by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Abu Dhabi Media Company and powered by YouTube. The site launched December 8th.

And what a first month VEVO had. In December alone, VEVO saw 35,395,000 unique visitors according to comScore.

“We are thrilled that the VEVO Network, which is still in its infancy, has debuted at the top of the comScore rankings for unique visitors across the Entertainment-Music category in the U.S.,” said Rio Caraeff, President and CEO, VEVO.  Read more... (208 words, estimated 50 secs reading time)

When Hitwise and Nielsen both released their December 2009 rankings and it showed Bing as dropping, I had a hunch that comScore was going to show the opposite.

And they did.

Bing grew its search share by 0.4% last month. That’s a total of 2.7% gain since launch. Unfortunately, for Microsoft, the expense continues to be due in part to sinking search share at Yahoo! That means when the two merge their search efforts, Bing won’t have gained at all.

However, if Bing can grow the combined search effort the way they’ve been able to grow since launch, they could be looking at some very good progress indeed.  Read more... (125 words, 2 images, estimated 30 secs reading time)

The 2009 holiday online shopping season began with a 3% increase over 2008. But as the season progressed, so did the shopping. Soon, there was a 4% increase. And just when it seemed like that’s as good as it was gonna get, a final point increase came in at the last minute. In the end, e-commerce was up 5% over the dismal 2008 shopping season, according to comScore numbers:

For a look back on tracking e-commerce through the 2009 holiday season, check out these posts:  Read more... (157 words, 1 image, estimated 38 secs reading time)

If you want to avoid the malls, find a good deal or are snowed in, then doing a little holiday shopping online is the way to go. And, boy, did you go there last weekend.

comScore showed a 13% increase for the last weekend before Rudolph guides the jolly man’s sleigh. Coremetrics showed a 24% jump for Friday and Saturday and a 20% jump for Sunday.

Still doesn’t explain why you still left 38% shopping to complete this week….