1. 1. Google: 128 million unique visitors
2. 2. Microsoft: 123 million
3. 3. Yahoo: 116 million
4. 4. Time Warner: 108 million
5. 5. News Corp.: 79 million
6. 6. eBay: 66 million
7. 7. InterActiveCorp.: 65 million
8. 8. Wikimedia Foundation: 57 million
9. 9. Amazon: 55 million
10. 10. NBC Universal: 51.2 million (estimated unduplicated audience after Weather.com acquisition)

Mmmh.. very interesting. In the ‘old days’ there were only traditional conglomerates like Time Warner and Disney on this list. Now you’ll notice online retailers like Amazon, auction platform eBay and open source encyclopedia Wikipedia. By the way: Where is Disney? Also noteworthy: With the acquisition of Weather.com, NBC will push the New York Times, the largest newspaper company on the Web, off the list…

My take: 1. Newspaper must learn to embrace Google instead of fighting it. Plus: They won’t be able successfully monetize their content on the World Wide Web by themselves in the long run (the Big G is already too dominant in online advertising). 2. I am sure these comments by Eric Schmidt weren’t exactly consoling for the old media managers.

Well, apparently there is. Engineers from Google’s branch in Seattle put their idea of a new master plan on a couple of local busses (see photo above, more pictures).

Turns out – this is ‘advertising in motion’ and part of Google’s effort to make young web geniuses check out its job listings. Definitely a creative way to recruit new talent! We’ll see if G’s Seattle branch (funny website, btw) will make more headlines soon…

P.S. The erased original Google master plan has a great shrine on Picasa. 

Yes, it’s true that young people are generally competent with technology, but it’s not true that students today are “expert searchers.” In fact, the report calls this “a dangerous myth.”But these are some truths about the “Google generation”, according to the report:

• They like to cut-and-paste. “There is a lot of anecdotal evidence and plagiarism is a serious issue.”
• They prefer visual information over text. “But text is still important… For library interfaces, there is evidence that multimedia can quickly lose its appeal, providing short-term novelty.”
• They multitask all the time. “It is likely that being exposed to online media early in life may help to develop good parallel processing skills.”

Does that mean they don’t care about copyrights, get easily bored about lengthy investigative magazine articles and suffer from ADD big time?? Well, somehow I expected a little bit more. Good news: We, the “older people” (meaning over 30), still have some chances to compete in the digital age….

Like many others who love L.A. I get shocked when December approaches and I become aware that this city doesn’t have a official Christmas tree. But one can still hope…

Google’s universal search (meaning the inclusion of any keyword-related results, such as pictures, books, news stories etc.) for “New York Christmas” not only lists nice pictures of Christmas trees in the “Big Apple”, but also news stories about Billy Joel’s anti-war Christmas single.

And some New York residents actually OBJECTING a public Christmas tree!

What about the “Los Angeles Christmas”? Oh my, the search results paint a sad, sad picture. No L.A. related Christmas photos, no YouTube videos, no relevant books. Nothing. Zilch.

The only Lala Land relevant Christmas ‘universal’ search result is a news article about “24″ TV star Kiefer Sutherland who will spend Xmas in prison for his second arrest for drunk-driving!

Depressing – but so L.A.!!

- With 20 billion to 35 billion worldwide searches in 2006/2007, search growth is as strong as ever. (Via ClickZ)

- Google remained in the top spot for search queries in the United States, accounted for 64.49 percent of all searches (Hitwise)

- More than $14 billion has been spent online during the holiday season-to-date – a 17 percent gain compared with the corresponding days last year. (via MarketingVox)

- Nearly 400 million Google search referrals are to its own multimedia properties. (via ClickZ)

- Local search is expected to grow from rougly $2.5 billion today to $5 billion in 2008. (via SearchEngineLand).

- In the third quarter of this year, more than one of four clicks on ads running on content networks like Google’s AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network was fraudulent. (via Mediapost)

- The caches of major search engines are still providing a safe hiding place for malicious code. (Computerworld)

- Google will very soon begin treating subdomains not as separate domains, but the same as subdirectories. (via Webmasterworld)

- Search Engines can help you to find a “dead” spouse. (via SearchEngineLand)

- And last, but not least: Larry Page, the world’s only remaining bachelor Google billionaire, is getting married today. (via ABC News)

Congratulations, Larry! Hope your first child will have cute googly eyes!