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Web 2.0 Summary: Jim Lanzone and Data from Bloglines and Ask

Jim Lazone, senior VP of search for Ask Jeeves, gave a fascinating look at some numbers from Bloglines and Ask.com. I didn't get it all, but luckily Jim has made the data available on the Ask blog, and has even posted the Powerpoint deck that he used. Here's a synopsis:

Gathered data about the number of feeds and subscribers on Bloglines:

  • 1.3M have 1+
  • 36k have 20+ subs
  • 14k have 50+
  • 60 have 5k+
  • 1 have 50k+ (Slashdot)

5% of searches can be classified as popular, the vast majority are very rare, very long tail.

Head queries:

  • dictionary
  • maps
  • hurricane rita

Tail queries:

  • pimp my page
  • radio jingle history

Long tail of search: verticals like local, health, jobs, gambling.

30% of searches drive 70% of search revenue (different from Terry Semel)

Average length of head/tail queries
Head: 1.57 words
Tail: 5.01 words

Advertising implications: easier to match to words in head [duh].

No one uses advanced search. 10% of people say they use it, but only 1% actually use it. Instead, visitors iterate searches.

The right-hand nav is where users look (via eye tracking studies) when their initial search didn't work... they go there to iterate. That section of the page receives 15% of clickthroughs on Ask.com.

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Comments (Post | Latest)

1. mardoen said on Oct 11 2005:

No wonder Slashdot has ads in their feed. They can easily ignore the purists when they have 50k subscribers viewing ads in Bloglines alone.

Hm, it would be interesting to see how many feed requests Slashdot actually serves. Isn't NetNewsWire still the most popular feed reader, or was that offline only?

2. kareem said on Oct 11 2005:

I know Slashdot throttles feed requests; otherwise, they might be, well, Slashdotted by readers requesting its feed every 5-15 minutes.

I think technically, my.yahoo is the most popular feed reader. If you're talking about an unintegrated product, I think Bloglines is up there and Rojo is gaining fast. Can't find the #s right now, but I thought I saw them on The Feedburner Weblog at some point.

3. mardoen said on Oct 14 2005:

thx

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About

Hi, I'm Kareem Mayan. I am Director of Product Development in FOX Interactive Media's Labs group. working on what's next.

I advise WorldBlu, helping them build democratic companies.

And, I helped bring Barcamp, a technology un-conference, to LA, which is where I live.

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