Google No. 1 Website In June, But Watch Out For Bing

Who’s No. 1 in website traffic? No surprise — its that 800-pound gorilla, Google, according to Compete.com. Google, with nearly 146 million unique visits, ranked No. 1 in June in the Compete 250, the company’s monthly ranking of the top 250 websites. Yahoo! was second with 142 million visits and Facebook was third with 122 million.

The company’s survey showed that search, entertainment and social networking continue to be the biggest traffic drivers on the Internet.

Despite the impressive performance, Google cannot afford to rest on its laurels. Microsoft’s Bing.com, the web’s newest search engine, saw its traffic skyrocket in June with nearly 50 million visits. It was only the first full month of activity for Bing, as it made good use of an eye-popping, $100 million advertising campaign.

The Google-Yahoo-Bing competition should be fun to watch, and the competition is heating up just as the search engine business is softening a bit. According to Compete, the overall search market declined by 1.7%, and Google lost 0.9% of its query volume. Meanwhile, Bing (and its predecessor, Live.com) served up 19 million more queries than it did in May.

Another Microsoft product, MSN, was fourth at 114 million. Then there was a big drop off to YouTube at No. 5 (78 million), Ebay sixth (73 million), Amazon.com seventh (65 million), Wikipedia eighth (62 million), MySpace ninth (60 million) and Microsoft.com No. 10 (55 million).

Bing’s performance wasn’t the only interesting story. AT&T and Apple both saw surges in traffic after the iPhone 3G S was officially unveiled on June 6th. Consumers flocked to the sites for the latest information on one of the summer’s most eagerly awaited smartphone releases. AT&T’s site traffic grew 8.2 percent and Apple saw a 19.1 percent increase over May traffic numbers. Both sites madeCompete’s top 50.

Another major traffic driver in June was news of Michael Jackson’s death. According to Compete, more than seven million people searched for “Michael Jackson,” with a lions share of that traffic no doubt going to Google. Another big winner in theMJ traffic surge was entertainment site TMZ.com, which saw its traffic soar by 37.4 percent — to just over nine million unique visits.

Quiz sites gummyquiz.com (7.7 million unique visits) and iqquizapp.com (7,9. million) received huge boosts in traffic from Facebook. Each site received more than 25 percent of its referral traffic from Facebook. According to Compete, gummyquiz.com, popular for the “How well do you know me?” application, received 92.9 percent of its referral traffic from Facebook.

About the Author
I have been knocking around the digital world since, well, a very long time. I can remember watching AP stories crawl across the screen on 300-baud dial-up during the early days of Compuserve and Prodigy. And yes, I vividly remember those pay-by-the-hour days on AOL. Since those early times I have held a variety of jobs in the interactive space, but I am probably best known for founding the original blackvoices.com. I raised $5 million in start-up money from Tribune Co. and hired a staff totaling nearly 40, with offices in L.A., Chicago and New York. Later, we sold the company to AOL, where it continues to thrive as one of the leaders in its category. Today I am still active in the space consulting with folks on a variety of projects.
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