Scholar Down, Books Up

Dean posted a scathing review of Google Scholar's performance over that past year based on a 32% decline in unique visitors according to ComScore data. More data on the changes at various Google properties between Nov. 2006 and Nov. 2007 are available in a TechCrunch posting. While I am sure that this data does not fully reflect actual Google traffic (and at least one comment on Battelle's Searchblog post says "a staff member from Google . . . tells me that ComScore has some of their numbers wrong"), I still find it fascinating. To no one's surprise, Web search is by far the busiest Google property. Google Directory traffic went down, which is not surprising since Google has made it so much harder to find. But the huge declines in Product Search (down 73%), Scholar (down 32%), and the Video Search (12% decline) surprised me. Book Search on the other hand has grown significantly in visitors (up 55%).

The chart showing which Google properties get the most visits is interesting as well. Web and Image search dominate and are both growing. After those two comes Gmail and Google Maps, which both rank higher in visitors than Google News. Given its increased prominence on the Google News page, I was also surprised to see how few visitors ever went to Blog search.

For Google users who visit many of their services, this is a telling lesson about how others use or do not use so many of Google's search services and applications. I also agree with Dean that Google Scholar's drop in visitors (if that is indeed accurate) comes in part from their failure to improve the service. I have found general Web searches often more effective than Google Scholar searches for at least some scholarly documents.