Leadpile’s Blog

According to CNBC there is a great new website being rolled out by the same company that owns Lending Tree and Ask.com- LIFE123.com.

We all use the internet as a source for information no matter what the topic is. Searching for information on the internet has truly become something we are “addicted” to. Well, there are a lot of resources available to search for information, besides just the search engines.
This great new website is a source for information that you will want to know more about. This site could be compared to such sites as About.com or chacha.com (which I did a previous post on).

What is Life123.com?
Life123 is the place to start when you need some answers to some questions you have about pretty much anything. The web site is full of experts that can help people quickly find information on a wide range of life topics.

Why Life123?
More and more, people are using search engines, however we are not always getting the information we need. According to the life123 website, roughly 75% of Americans experience search engine fatigue. Everyone has spent hours looking for information without finding what they really need.

What does Life123 cover?
Life123 covers 11 life categories: Beauty; Style, Celebrations, Food; Drink, Health; Wellness, Home; Garden, Money, Parenting; Family, Relationships, Technology, Travel; Leisure, and Work.

Enjoy LIFE!

What if television was like search engines? Let’s say you have basic cable with 46 channels… can you imagine the reaction and the uproar if everyone was watching only four of those channels? What if they were really only watching one channel with a few (crazy?) people watching the other three channels. Well, this could be the old Soviet Union or the current situation with today’s search engines.

Surprisingly, little is said about just how dominant Google is in this very important part of everyday life. The Hitwise numbers for the end of June are out and Google’s control of the search activity continues to GROW. They are up 8% over last year, and almost 7 of every 10 searches are done on Google. It’s even worse in Australia and the UK where Google almost accounts for 9 of 10 searches. Can it possibly be good that one company has such huge market share?

There has been a lot of talk about Yahoo and Microsoft combining their search efforts. Well, those two giants combined account for 25.08% of recent search activity. (Yahoo – 19.62% and MSN – 5.46%) The fourth channel, I mean search engine, is ask.com accounting for 4.17% of the searches.

We do have at least 42 other search engine options…sadly, only 1.7% of all searches were done on these other sites. Search engines are the primary way that people navigate the internet, and Google continues to dominate and even grow their market share. How is it that we are presented with more options in most facets of everyday life, but the emerging internet presents us so few options. Can this domination be good for anyone other than Google shareholders?

Many of our clients come to us because it has become too expensive to advertise or do any type of SEO on Google and the other major search engines. How dominant is Google in this area? Well, in the month of May, Google accounted for over 68% of the search activity in the U.S. Yahoo was second with just under 20% of the search activity. MSN and Ask.com combined for 10% of the search activity. (Yes, if you are good at math, that leaves less than 2% of all searches for all the other search engines) By the way, if you think Google dominates here, you should look “across the pond” where Google accounted for 87% of the U.K. search activity in May. So, if you are frustrated with dealing with the dominant players, please let us do the “heavy lifting” and we will continue providing great leads in our marketplace.