Hitwise released today an interesting breakdown of Google properties, products, and pages by traffic for the week ending second February. The chart provides some telling data about which Googlings bring in the most traffic home, which have been leading the pact, and which — frankly — need a kick in the boot.
There were several interesting things about the breakdown that struck me. Firstly, I was surprised by the lackluster of most of the (and I’ve only realized how much I hate the term over the last few months) “Web 2.0″ properties — with the exception of YouTube — in terms of traffic. Going down the list, Orkut, Google Maps, Blogger, Google Calendar, and Picasa Web Albums all together account for less than 2% of Google’s traffic. I know, I know, “2.0″ is about leaving the pageview behind and shifting to a more relevant metric — like time spent on site — but you’d expect at least a social network and a blogging service to rake in a little more than the decimals.
The surpising winner, to me at least, is Google Image Search. For how unchanged and un-monetized the interface has remained over the last few years and how much development and effort Google has put into some of its newer product lines, namely Google Docs, you’d expect Google to be delegating PhD’s by the bunch to create better image search.
The unsurprising winner of all, of course, is Google’s core product — Google search — that rakes in a majority of 55.92%. Need I say more?
All in all, I think the takeaway for the list is how much we think we’ve changed and evolved over the last decade and how little we actually have. Google’s core products still remain king, and at core, you can’t call Google anything other than a search company. I’d be interested to see the same kind of a list for Microsoft/Yahoo!’s properties.
