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Main on January 13th, 2009 by Pingdom
Remember “social search”? There has been plenty of buzz around this term in the past couple of years, but here’s a super-quick reminder from Wikipedia if you’re fuzzy on the details:
Social search or a social search engine is a type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users.
Sounds like a smart way to at least complement more traditional approaches to Web search, and we are sure it has a future. There are plenty of services vying for a place in this space, such as Mahalo and Wikia Search. However, while we were doing research about Web terminology trends last week, we stumbled upon this very interesting little nugget:
Social search seems to be strictly a US phenomenon, at least judging by Google search statistics. This screenshot from Google Insights for Search says it all:
As you can see, an overwhelming majority of the interest for social search is in the United States.
We should point out that this is not the way it looks for other related terms, such as “social media”, “social network” or “crowdsourcing”. Those are widely used across the world.
Either the rest of the world is using a completely different term for social search (in that case, what?), or the interest is concentrated almost 100% to the United States.
What is the reason behind this discrepancy? Any ideas?
Want to test your site every minute?
Posted in
Main,
Mobile podcast on February 9th, 2012 by Pingdom
Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.
In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending approval of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We also talked about Nokia’s recent financial results, if Google Chrome can hit more than 50% market share this year, and the recent privacy-blunder by the guys behind the Path mobile app.
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Posted in
Main on February 9th, 2012 by Pingdom
There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.
So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.
Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.
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Posted in
Main on February 8th, 2012 by Pingdom
Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!
For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.
Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.
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Posted in
Main on February 8th, 2012 by Pingdom
Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.
As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.
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Posted in
Main on February 7th, 2012 by Pingdom
In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.
But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.
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Daniel Howard
January 13th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
This fad is too lame to have caught on in other countries, even those that speak English?
David
January 14th, 2009 at 8:02 am
I will begin that my facebook and twitter accounts are 90% non Americans. Google is going by dry statistics of those that search about the new trend in Internet.
The layman will not even know that he is participating in “social interaction” that serves the search engines.
If Google did this same survey per region, you would see different results. (You cannot compare a population of +/- 300 Million to a country of 6 million and less.)
Pingdom
January 14th, 2009 at 8:14 am
@Daniel: Perhaps. Who knows?
@David: Actually, while you have a point, the results in Google Insights for Search are normalized. In other words, they are scaled based on the total number of searches in each country/region. This way you CAN compare small and large countries on an equal basis, at least the pure general interest levels.
Craig Stadler
April 17th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Please also include buddyfetch.com in your social search engines review/list.