Saturday, July 12, 2008

Something Has Changed at Google Image Search

Since Flickr began offering traffic statistics most referrals to my photostream have come from Flickr, Yahoo! image search, Google, and Google image search in that order. Flickr has always accounted for over 50% of the traffic with Yahoo! image coming in above 15% and both Google and Google image in the low single digits. I attributed this to Yahoo! giving preference to it's own property in image searches although I could never understand why Google was linking to my photostream more often than Google images. Recently, however, the dynamics have changed. The overall numbers have not changed much other than Google images has surpassed Google in my overall referrals. But on a daily basis things have really changed. The daily ranking is now Flickr followed by Google images, Yahoo! images, and finally Google. (Yesterday Baidu actually came in ahead of Google but that is an anomaly.) In the new daily rankings Flickr accounts for less than 50% of my referrals while Google images has shot up to %25. Yahoo! images holds steady at about 17% and Google remains at around 1%.
I am sure this is pretty boring stuff but I can't help wondering what changed at Google images.

*An interesting (to me) side note regarding site referrals: baidu.com accounts for a very small (less than 1%) but steady number of referrals to my photostream. The interesting thing is that 100% of my Baidu referrals come from the search term "second baseman".
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