Is Bitly Bigger than Google?

On January 20, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

That’s the question I had to ask after seeing this post by John Borthwick with this chart.

I recently wrote a post on Bitly’s new search feature. It turns out that’s a bigger deal I thought initially.

The chart is about impossible to read but if you look in the upper right hand corner you’ll see where a yellow line intersects a dashed line. That’s Bitly’s decodes (clicks) and traffic data John gave for Google. By the looks of this chart you could get the impression that Bitly is bigger than Google.

That obviously didn’t seem right so I did a little digging. What I present bellow is a series of apples to oranges comparisons and really bad math.

The number for Google must be the traffic for Google.com. I got these numbers which are similar from Compete. (Click for larger image.)146 unique visitor a month.

But we all know that unique visits to Google.com don’t equate to number of searches on all of Google’s properties, which is the real number that matters.

But this number is really interesting:

bit.ly: last week was the largest week ever for clicks on bit.ly links. 564m were clicked on in total. On the Jan 6th there were a record of 98m decodes.    1100 clicks every second.

That was the week of January 11th, the same week that Twitter had it’s highest usage day. So knowing that this was a peak usage number but assuming that Bit.ly will continue to grow we’ll use that number: 98 million decodes (clicks) in one day. That’s 3 billion clicks in one month (again Bit.ly’s not there yet but humor me).

What about Google? The most recent data I could find was from Search Engine Watch from the summer of 2009 (I’m sure there’s better data but again, humor me). This claims that in Aug of 2009 Google had 6.9 Billion searches. Way more than Bit.ly clicks.

But wait. How big is Bit.ly? About 6 people and they’ve only been around a few years. How big is Google? ~20,000 employees and they have about a 12 year head start on Bitly.

Yeah big deal, I know. Let’s get really funny with the math.

That 6.9 Billion number is for all of Google’s properties. What if you separate the second largest search engine? (which Google also owns), YouTube.

Over a year ago YouTube was generating 2.7 Billion searches a month and with YouTube’s explosive growth this last year we’ll conservatively round up to 3 Billion. Subtracting those number you end up with

  • Google – 3.9 Billion
  • YouTube – 3 Billion
  • Bitly – 3 Billion

Not so funny anymore is it? So in one way (yes this is non-statistically accurate and apples to oranges but it’s fun) Bitly is as big as YouTube and almost as big as the rest of Google. This also explains why Bitly launched Bitly.tv and Google and YouTube both launched their own URL shorteners.

But wait, there’s more Bitly only has about 55% market share. That means the total market of clicks from URL shorteners could be nearing 5.5 Billion a month. But then we’d have to compare that to the total search market which is double that.

So no Bitly isn’t bigger than Google and even stretching the number as much as I did, it’s still not even as big but I think it’s a sign of things to come.

All funny number aside I only have one question? Why the hell hasn’t Google or Microsoft bought Bitly yet? Besides the clicks all that data is a gold mine.

Twitter and Facebook aren’t the threat to Google, we are. We would rather share links than search. Social networks are just the pipes we use to share but this puts a lot of power in the hands of the URL shorteners as they are the carriers of that information.

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Social Media Makes Search More Wicked [Bitly vs Feedly]

On January 17, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

I love wicked problems. No, not that type of wicked. A wicked problem is a problem where the more you learn about it the harder it gets. Search is a wicked problem. Scaling social networks is a wicked problem. Searching real time social data is a very, very wicked problem.

I use url shortener Bit.ly and it’s sister service J.mp, a lot. I love these services because of the great real time analytics they show you.  I am even willing to sign up for their Pro tools but they’re still invite only.

Today I noticed Bit.ly Search. You can search through all of Bit.ly’s real time data and compare data on links being shared. Below you’ll see a screen shot of a search for Haiti. You can see the article title, the URL of the article and the last tweet that posted the article.

I think it’s interesting that they don’t show you who the first person to post the link was. I think that would be far more interesting then the last person to RT the link. You can however click the info button to see all the info they have on that link including the first person to post the link.

bitly and feedly search

bitly and feedly search

They are obviously using click through and time as the measures for relevance.

Another interesting feature is the ability to see more links posted by the user. This really gets into people discovery. The result when you click the info button is that it takes you to a search for that user name.. So even if someone isn’t signed up with Bitly, assuming they use Bitly and not one of the other URL shorteners you can see all of a users shared links. This feature alone has pushed me over the tipping point to quit sharing links from Google Reader through FriendFeed, which uses the ff.in, and start using Reader to Twitter, which uses Bit.ly so that I can track all of my shared links here.

One thing that you will note is in the bottom right corner there is a small blue box with some other results. This is Feedly and it’s feature Feedly mini. Every time I search on any page, Feedly gives me a small list of results which it pulls from my Google Reader. But the real power of Feedly is when you search from your account within Feedly.

I have included several screen grabs and you can click on them to see larger versions.

Feedly gives you several options for your search and here I chose to just search withing my own resources. You see the news and then results just from withing my Google Reader sources.

You also see here the sources being pulled from and I can click on anyone of those to narrow down my search just to that source.

Feedly then does something fun, and it’s part of their revenue model I’m sure, is they go and search Amazon using recommendations from my account to show me recommended books on Haiti. I like this far better than AdWords.

Bellow that you see search results pulled from Twitter. I have my setting adjusted a little further so that I only see tweets containing links or hashtags. Where Bitly leveraged it’s size (it’s the #1 URL shortener and the default on Twitter) so I could search across most of the links being shared on Twitter about Haiti, Feedly allows me to see only the links my network is sharing on Haiti. Two different approaches but both very powerful in their own right.

The last results on the page are searches on YouTube and Flickr on Haiti. These are not from my network but in this case that’s a good thing since I don’t have very large networks on either of those sites.

Like I mentioned earlier thought Feedly get’s the extra advantage of being a browser pluggin and is with me where ever I go. It becomes ubiquitous. This is alos only one feature of Feedly. It’s not actually a search product, although it does it quite well. Even better than that, Feedly is also an amazing work flow tool. But I’ll save that for another post.

While both of these services take two different approaches they both have their obvious advantages. By building it’s own rich pool of data Bitly is proving to be a serious player in semantic search.

Prediction: I’m willing to bet Bit.ly gets acquired before the summer’s over.

Feedly has taken the opposite approach. They are aggregating all of my personally relevant data from Google, Twitter, Amazon and YouTube and Flickr. There site is the interface, so it’s not even like going to their site to search. It really feels like I’m going to a page I own that just happens to overlay a bunch of my own content. Feedly doesn’t own any of the data but they don’t have to.

On this note I will make the only fair comparison between the two services. It’s irrelevant to compare their approach or their results but it is fair to compare their interfaces.

Bitly is young and still developing but come on, it’s search result page has to be the ugliest interface out there. With the tweet, links, url’s and very little descriptive text I find it hard to read.  My only advice to Bitly is to fix that. It makes a huge difference in how often and how long users will use the site. Bitly has always felt sparse and not in a good way. It feels raw like I’m looking at the back end of an unfinished site.

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What is wrong with Bit.ly? [Update]

On July 16, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

Updated: See below

I love Bit.ly. I love it so much I’ve set up my clients with it. It’s a great tool for tracking clicks and conversations around tweets.

But the last two days, multiple clients of mine have notice after logging in that they were logged in as someone else. Both of these screen grabs are from the same person and neither of them are right.

clip_image002[4]

clip_image002

Anyone else having this problem?

Anyone know of another service that has the same features?

Update: Working with Bit.ly on this now. This seems to be an isolated incident linked to this one account.

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Why URL Shorteners Are Important

On May 21, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
bit.ly FAIL blowfish
Image by bpedro via Flickr

There’s probably hundreds of URL shorteners now. Seriously, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. They’re really easy to build (there’s even a WordPress plugin that makes them out of your blog URL) and they are proving invaluable to content publishers. (NYT article on shorter URLs)

Tinyurl was the first shortener. It predates Twitter and was primarily used by IT guys who had to email those hideously long URL’s you get from large enterprise sites. Then with Twitter and other microblogging services the need to save those precious characters drove the advent of really short shorteners. But Bit.ly quickly changed all of that. Now URL shorteners offer the ability to get real time stats on the nemer of clicks, the number of times a link get’s re-shared and even the conversations that are happening around your link.

Bit.ly is still my favorite service. Here’s a bonus tip, you can hack any Bit.ly link someone else share’s to see the tracking metrics of that link. Take any Bit.ly link like this one http://bit.ly/9be3i and add info/ in the middle like so http://bit.ly/info/9be3i. (Note: Bit.ly has been upgrading their service so this may not work perfectly but you should be able to get the idea.)

Many people out there hate URL shorteners. Spammers use them to hide malicious or affiliate links. Another legitimate concern is what happens *when* some of these services start going under? The Web will be littered with hundreds, thousands or even millions of dead links.

I love URL shorteners and think they are going to be indispensable to content producers and marketers. URL shorteners enable you to track your content (via the link) wherever the Web stream takes it. You can track engagement, pass-along and .

I also think that since you know where your content ends up, URL shorteners will help solve the comment tracking/re-aggregation that plagues all of us bloggers. (That’s going to be a very messy problem however).

What do you think, do URL shorteners make the Web better or worse?

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