The Wardman Wire

Google websites account for more than a third of all traffic to UK websites. It also has a strong presence in a large number of Internet market segments. Do we need to worry?

Yesterday I asked the question:

Which do you think is the most visited website in the UK?

I asked because I ran across a post on Robin Goad’s Hitwise UK blog analysing the source (i.e., referrer) of UK internet traffic , and as a follow-up to my Economist post at the weekend.

A few people replied (thanks, guys). This is the detailed list from Hitwise:

Rank / Website / Market Share

1. http://www.google.co.uk 7.77%
2. http://mail.live.com 3.1%
3. http://www.ebay.co.uk 2.75%
4. http://www.facebook.com 2.07%
5. http://uk.msn.com 1.76%
6. http://www.google.com 1.7%
7. http://www.bebo.com 1.45%
8. http://www.youtube.com 1.31%
9. http://news.bbc.co.uk 0.99%
10. http://www.myspace.com 0.88%
11. http://www.bbc.co.uk 0.87%
12. http://www.microsoft.com 0.85%
13. http://uk.mail.yahoo.com 0.84%
14. http://uk.yahoo.com 0.79%
15. http://www.orange.co.uk 0.72%
16. http://www.wikipedia.org 0.61%
17. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport 0.59%
18. http://images.google.co.uk 0.58%
19. http://www.amazon.co.uk 0.48%
20. http://www.msn.com 0.47%

These are the points that I note:

- The dominance of google.co.uk over google.com. I’ll make my traditional point that many UK Political Websites targetting UK traffic would be better off on .uk domains, since google.co.uk gives an extra weighting to these domains in search results. The diagram indicates that google.co.uk accounts for more than a quarter of “upstream” (i.e., referrer) traffic to UK websites. That was my point from last spring.

- I’m surprised how far down the BBC are on that list – albeit they are still the top “content” site.

- The appearance of images.google.co.uk at position 18 is interesting. For some time web-design commentators have been pointing out that using descriptive names for images is a good contributor towards ranking in the search engines – this is one reason why that is the case. On this site we receive a small but significant group of visitors via the Google images search.

I’d be interested to hear your further thoughts, but in the meantime Hitwise also provided a list of the top 10 “owners” – combining different Internet “properties” into a single figure.

Traffic From Google Properties

Robin has also come up with a list of Google’s top web properties, which together account for more than a third of all upstream traffic.

Here’s the graph of how this figure has developed over time.

These are my take away points:

- Unless you really don’t care about how many visitors you have, Google deserves attention. It is quite a brave website that declares “I’m going to ignore Google completely”.

- For political websites, the opportinity to exploit the channel provided by Google is going to continue to be significant way to encourage political of the general UK population in politics. That is important.

Google Monopoly Potential?

There was a leader column in the Guardian yesterday about Google’s domination of search:

The internet has become a universal resource with a vital role in education – and search engines are now most people’s way of accessing it. Given that level of influence, it is obviously unhealthy for too much potential power to be vested in a single search engine. So, as Google gets ever stronger, it becomes harder for it to live up to its slogan, “Don’t be evil”, which initially set it apart from other companies.

and

The proposed merger has been about how other players could combat Google’s increasing arm lock on search and the El Dorado of advertising that goes with it.

Tim Worstall zeroes in on and dismisses the assertion that search dominance feeds through to advertising dominance:

Google’s dominance of search really isn’t a problem: its dominance of advertising might potentially be.

Not Search, but Integrated across Sectors

I want to make a point different from both of these: any problem is not in one sector; it is in Google’s potential to build an integrated dominant position across several sectors of the market. Google is more a potential Standard Oil than a potential Microsoft.

After all (for example), Microsoft did not have the potential (for example) to outcompete the Yellow Pages. This ability to build positions across sectors is new, and is down to the down to the emergence of a globalised Internet.

Google’s potential to create strong positions in new market sectors is because it is its own doorkeeper – due to dominance of the search sector it drives a large share of the traffic to its own and others’ websites.

Take a list of the top 20 Google domains published (US data) by Hitwise in January.

That shows that within the list search is dominant (hardly surprising, as search is dominant on the Internet itself), but it the range that is interesting. There are many other properties not included on this list.

Wrapping-Up

The strongest argument against the concern about a potential dominant position for Googe is “but it hasn’t happened yet”.

Maybe, but the statistic highligted in the article I linked to at the start of this post is that Google delivers over a hird of UK traffic – and that is enough to make things change quickly. So vigilance is in order.

For a final reference, try this short study of Google’s increase in marketshare in online mapping (US data).