Google Print Is Google's Ninth Most Popular Service

With all the debate over what
Google Print
might do to publishers, I was wondering if anyone was even using the service?
Surely it wouldn’t even crack the top ten of the most used Google services. As
it turns out, indeed it does.

I turned to Bill Tancer of competitive intelligence service
Hitwise, who

showed on his great blog recently how most traffic from Google Print flows
"downstream" to online book sellers.

That’s not surprising, given that Google provides links to booksellers as
part of the pages it displays in Google Print. FYI, last time we checked, Google
said it does not earn of off any book sales generated from visits that Google
Print generates.

But how many people actually use Google Print at all? Bill said Hitwise
couldn’t generate audience estimates, but he did give me a percentage breakdown
of traffic to all Google sites for a one week period ending Nov. 5. The summary
is below (rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent for all visits, except those
below a tenth of a percent):

1. Google Web Search: 79.9 percent
2. Google Image Search: 9.2 percent
3. Google Mail/Gmail: 5.6 percent
4. Google News: 1.6 percent
5. Google Maps: 0.8 percent
6. Froogle: 0.7 percent
7. Google Scholar: 0.6 percent
8. Google Groups/Groups 2 Beta: 0.5 percent
9. Google Print: 0.4 percent
10. Google Earth: 0.3 percent
11. Google Directory: 0.2 percent
12. Google Local: 0.1 percent
13. Google Answers: 0.1 percent
14. Google AdWords: 0.06 percent
15. Google Desktop Search: 0.04 percent
16. Google Talk: 0.02 percent

As you can see, Google Print doesn’t have a ton of use compared to other
Google services — but it was still impressive to see it cracked the top ten.

Also notice how Google Local is below Google Maps. Google
recently
turned Google Maps into Google Local, and it’s not hard to see why. If Google
Maps was getting more traffic, the merging the two was an easy way to get more
usage of local.

However, earlier this year Google
said that
Google Local was more popular than Froogle. It could be that Hitwise might not
be counting the Google Maps/Google Local visits correctly due to the change. I’m
checking with Bill on this and will postscript a follow up.