Category: Archive

According to the latest stats from Compete, Twitter didn’t fare too well in October.  In fact, rather than pull in more unique visitors compared to the previous month, Twitter may have lost some and turned a one-time anomaly into a two-time streak.

As the below graph shows, Twitter’s growth rate slowed quite a bit starting in June.  Compete then recorded that its unique visitor count peaked in August.  September didn’t play out at all in the site’s favor, and in October, both visits and unique visitors dropped by about 2.1 percent.

Update: Intel has now updated its Fourth-quarter financial expectations:

Churchill Downs Inc. (CDI), home of the Kentucky Derby, has agreed to buy online horse wagering firm Youbet.com in a cash-and- stock deal valued at $126.8 million.

The deal would give Churchill Downs over $700 million worth of the $1.4 billion online horse wagering market. Churchill Downs already owns online horse betting site TwinSpires.com.

Google has launched some new improvements to its movie showtimes search feature. These include more movie pages, genre filters, and a new map view.

If you search for a movie and click the "more theaters" link in the showtimes listing, you will be taken to a more thorough page about that movie, including more showtimes, reviews, trailers, photos, etc. You can also see a list of new genre filters to search by on the left-hand side of the screen.

Mac users who’ve been feeling left out since the introduction of Google Chrome (which occurred way back in September of 2008) may finally be set to receive a sort of nod of inclusion.  A Mountain View-based product manager has indicated that a beta version of Chrome for Mac will launch in December.

Google product listing ads have been spotted every now and then for a while now. The company has been testing them, but now the they have announced that US users will start seeing them more frequently on shopping related queries.

According to new data from Experian Hitwise, October was the month of the underdog with respect to the search market.  The two search companies that usually dominate lost a bit of share, while Bing (and to a lesser degree, Ask) gained ground.

Let’s start with the success stories.  Bing’s market share rose from 8.96 percent in September to 9.57 percent in October, which represents an increase of 6.8 percent.  That’s nothing to sneer at, even if Bing remains solidly in third place.

The media frenzy over swine flu may have died down a little since earlier this year; it’s no longer a top headline on every other news site, at least.  But people remain extremely concerned about it (anyone care to guess how many tons of hand sanitizer have been sold?), and Google’s trying to help out by pointing them towards flu shots.

YouTube wants you to know that it’s not just a place for individuals to watch videos.  This afternoon, the site released some stats (and used the word "social" about six times) to show that users are interacting with each other and with different sites in all sorts of ways.

Google has used its Insights for Search tool to provide some data about consumers’ searching behavior when it comes to things like discounts, free shipping for the holidays, coupons, and promotional codes.