SearchEngineUpdate with Vanessa Zamora - 04-18-2008 Part I
Abstract: 1. comScore’s Shares Slip After Google Announcement, 2. Alexa Web Site Implements New Ranking System
Vanessa Zamora
Video Content Producer, SearchEngineWorld
5:12 pm on April 18, 2008 (utc 0)
Transcript
Friday April 18, 2008
comScore’s Shares Slip After Google Announcement
Before Google released its 1st quarter earnings report, some Wall Street analysts were concerned over recent estimates from research firm comScore that Google would see a mere 1.8% growth year over year in paid clicks, fueling talk of the possible effects of a weakening economy. On Thursday Google reported a 20% increase in its paid click advertisements during the first quarter from a year earlier. Despite a discrepancy in measurements used to calculate the data, ComScore's estimates were for U.S. clicks only, and excluded some non-search Google partners, while Google reported overall, worldwide numbers, Google’s earnings report caused comScore shares to fall more than 8% in after hour trading Thursday, while Google's shares surged about 17% in after-hours trading, showing that the weak economy hadn't hurt its business as some analysts predicted.
Web information company Alexa has announced the implementation of a new ranking system that it says will more accurately reflect the publics’ interests and Web surfing habits. Alexa began displaying rankings in 1998 with the goal of showing its Alexa Toolbar users how popular any given site was within the Alexa community and has since become a source by which website popularity is measured. With the change, Alexa will now aggregate data from multiple sources to give users a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users, rather than just the Internet usage of those people who manually install the Alexa toolbar. Alexa hopes the change will quiet concerns of inaccurate site ratings and help it better compete against rivals such as compete.com.
5:12 pm on April 18, 2008 (utc 0)