I was checking out Google Trends, the new Google service that shows the search volume for certain keywords, relative to the sum total. Here's the Google Trends chart for "web hosting", which seems to have a declining share of search.
And here's a chart from Netcraft. The Internet has grown by 909,o00 active websites between Netcraft's April 2006 and May 2006 web server surveys.
My first reaction was, GoDaddy and RackSpace should give up on Google Adwords. If the two graphs are moving in opposite directions, maybe keyword search is not how a vast majority of new website owners find their hosting providers. But then I realized I totally misinterpreted the data. Oops.
Alexa shows that over the past two years Google tripled its daily reach from 100,000 to 300,000 web users per million. So while web hosting now represents a smaller percentage of the total number of Google searches, the absolute number of people looking for web hosting on Google has actually increased dramatically.
And, here's something else I was wrong about. For the past few months my friend Serguei has argued again and again that the web hosting industry doesn't get its fair share of attention from the media.
The bottom portion of this graph (it's the same Google Trends graph from the beginning of this post) tracks the absolute number of times "web hosting" has been mentioned in Google News articles. While there's been some increase in web hosting media coverage, the volume has not kept pace with the level of user interest.
Nice oberservation.
The graph could seem misleading, but the truth is there is more and more web hosting searches done each month.
Posted by: pawel | February 22, 2007 at 01:44 AM
Pawel,
I'm not sure that's the case. Google Trends shows that there are fewer and fewer web hosting searches each month. Check out
http://www.google.com/trends?q=web+hosting
Posted by: Isabel Wang | February 23, 2007 at 02:15 PM