Buzz off- searchers message to Google
Google’s controversial Buzz social web offering seems to have hit the buffers already as searches ignore it.
Although it was only released last month, it seems that the hype surrounding Google Buzz is all but dead.
Online ad network, Chitika reported that the web searches on the internet in general and on its network of 80,000 sites has definitely died for Google Buzz.
The Chitika blog post explains:
February 9th, 2010 – the day Buzz was launched – the search engines lit up with queries. The Chitika network saw about 1,500 searches that day for the term “Google Buzz,” approximately 15 times the number of searches for “Twitter.”
However, those searches dropped off quickly – on February 10th, there were 580 searches; on the 11th, 147. From the 12th on – only three days removed from Buzz’s much-hyped launch – searches for Google Buzz failed to break three digits, and in most cases elicited less than 10 searches per day.
The graph below shows Google Buzz’s fall in popularity.
And it’s not just Chitika that is seeing this trend. Google’s own research tool, Insights for Search tells a similar story.
According to the Google tool, by the 15th of February (only 5 days after the launch) searches for the service had dwindled to less than ten a day, and since February 26th there had only been about one search per day. While the chatter on Twitter about Google Buzz remains quite constant.
According to the data, in the past month, Google Buzz has been sending less traffic to TechCrunch than FriendFeed — the service which is essentially the same as Buzz, only better, and ever since the acquisition by Facebook has been a ghost town.
In the past month, FriendFeed is the #52 referrer of traffic to TechCrunch (in its heyday, it was occasionally in the top 20), Google Buzz, meanwhile, is at best #55.
Dr Search’s message to Google is simple- before you launch you next project protect your users’ privacy first- don’t frogmarch them into submission. Or risk another failure!
