Alexa.com Competitor Compete.com Acquired

TNS, a world leader in market information and insight, announced that it has agreed to acquire Compete.com for a total of US$150 million. An initial cash payment of US$75 million will be made upon closing and the remainder will be payable upon performance targets being met over several years.

Compete.com provides online traffic metrics about web sites very much like Alexa.com, comScore and Hitwise - which was acquired last year by Experian for US$240 million.

Compete conducts continuous analysis of internet clickstream data from close to 2 million people received from its own panel and from internet service providers. They uses proprietary data methodologies to normalise this data, making it representative of the entire US online market place. This information is used to measure how consumers consider, engage with and buy a client’s products or services online, relative to those of its competition. This ability to analyse online behaviour before a purchase is made enables Compete to advise clients on how to target online communications to individual consumers, to influence both their online and offline purchasing behaviour. It specialises in the telecoms, media, automotive, travel, financial services and online search.

As internet usage and e-retailing increases, clickstream data is expected to become a significant information source around which market research and analysis is based. Recent estimates suggest that the US market in which Compete operates will grow from $325 million in 2007 to $500 million in 2009.

Compete.com won the award for the "Best Content Search Engine" at Searchnomics 2007.

Google's New SearchMash Site

Google has launched a new non-Google branded site called SearchMash which is designed to serve as an experimental testing ground for user interface ideas without the Google brand skewing the objectivity of the results.

Here are 14 observations on SearchMash:
1. The character count on the SearchMash homepage is even less than the Google.com classic homepage.
2. With SearchMash, there is no search button but there are instructions to 'hit enter to get results' but those directions disappear on the search results page. I always hit 'enter' myself versus clicking the "Google Search" button and I never click "I'm Feeling Lucky". I wonder how many people actually do.
3.The SERP page on SearchMash has a frame for the header which houses the search text field so it doesn't scroll with the page.
4. On SearchMash, you can only search web pages by default whereas Google shows you the options to search for images, videos, news, maps, blogs, etc. but SearchMash automatically gives you results for web, images, blogs, videos, and wikipedia oddly enough.
5. My search for 'flowers' on SearchMash yielded about half the number of results (14,200,000) than on Google (22,600,000). There is no time of how long it took to generate the results, the number of results showing on the page, or definitions.
6. The search results are on the left, and the images, blogs, videos, and wikipedia results are in the right rail along with a feedback survey which doesn't take you off the page. It doesn't seem to save your feedback results on the page if you navigate away to another site and then come back or do another type of search like image/blog/video/wikipedia and and go back to web search.
7. There is no pagination. There are ten results by default, designated by a "..." divider (not sure that's necessary) and when you click a link for 'more web results' or hit the space bar, the page expands downward until, in this case, I hit 100 results (so not sure what happened to my 14,300,000 results) versus paging to more pages as on Google.
8. The results are numbered which is also different from its Google counterpart.
9. The color palette is the same kind of blue and white just a softer blue and no yellow designated 'Sponsored Links' section and no heavy demarcation of section areas. So, if there are any paid links, they are not called out in anyway.
10. The font size is smaller by default (12px), all the text is the same size, the blue is a little brighter and there is no underlining by default for links (not even on mouseover but opting instead for background highlighting).
11. You can click to see images or blogs or video results which then loads in the left channel and web results moves to the top right column and whichever type of result you've clicked on doesn't show up on the right.
12. You can click on 'hide details' in the title bar to collapse the display of web or images results, allowing more results to fit in view.
13. Searches seem ranked the same as on Google.
14. From your SERP, you can also search within a site. So, my search yielded 1800flowers.com as a result, which I could click on to navigate to or search their site for 'flowers'. Cool! It will be interesting to see how this evolves.