• Compete Top 50: Bing And Ask Rise – MySpace, MapQuest And Flickr Fall

    Robin Wauters

    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

    Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites).

    Compete’s data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft’s search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as well as Ask.com (up 8.7 percent for the month and 75.3 percent for the year). On the other side of the spectrum we – unsurprisingly – find MySpace (unique visitors down 5.53 percent for the month and 19.1 percent for the year) and MapQuest (down 5.8 for the month and 22.1 percent for the year).

    If MySpace’s redesign will help buck the trend remains to be seen.

    Perhaps more surprisingly, Yahoo’s Flickr.com seems to have lost some of its shine lately, showing a 14 percent decline in unique user visits in September 2010.

    And what about IAC’s Ask.com, which actually jumped over online juggernauts such as Amazon.com and MSN.com last month, according to Compete’s data. The search engine is now ranked in sixth place, trailing sites like Wikipedia, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and YouTube.

    Other winners include Disney’s Go.com and Mozilla.com, which showed the largest monthly unique user visitor gains (15.8 percent and 30.5 percent, respectively).

    Product: Bing
    Website: bing.com
    Company Microsoft

    Bing is a decision (search) engine from Microsoft officially announced on May 28, 2009. It combines technology from the Farecast and Powerset acquisitions, as well as new algorithms and a more colorful page design, to attempt to understand the context behind the search, which Microsoft claims gives users better results. Bing as a brand is also an attempt to eliminate the confusion caused by Microsoft’s “Windows Live” branding. Bing is now everything “search” related, whereas Windows Live encompasses the remnants...

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    Product: Ask.com Q&A
    Website: ask.com
    Company Ask.com

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    Company: Compete
    Website: compete.com
    Launch Date: 2000
    Funding: $33M

    Compete helps the world’s top brands improve their marketing based on the online behavior of millions of consumers. Advertisers, agencies and publishers use Compete’s products and services to create engaging online experiences and profitable advertising campaigns. Compete is located in Boston, MA, with offices across the U.S., U.K. and France. For more information, please visit http://www.compete.com/.

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