The Brit Awards take place tomorrow evening and there are three awards up for the public vote: best British Breakthrough Act, best British Live Act, and best British Single. The latter is tricky to analyze using search data, but I thought I’d have a look at the first two. The chart below illustrates weekly UK Internet searches for the five acts nominated for British Breakthrough Act in the weeks since the nominations were announced.

Yahoo! Search attracts a younger audience than Google. I promised a post with figures to back up my claim (sorry I am a day late - forgot it was Valentine's Day!). The following charts show the percentage of visits from each age group to Yahoo! Search and Google.com.

We’ve just completed our latest hot gadget list and, given the amount of coverage they have received, I wasn’t surprised to see that the Nintendo Wii is currently the most searched for console in the UK, nor that the iPhone now accounts for one third of all searches for a specific mobile phone. However, one gadget that has crept up slowly without a huge amount of fanfare is the digital photo frame – those small LCD photo frames that show digital photos either via a USB connection or memory card slot. In fact, they are now so popular that last week searches for them overtook searches for cameras – digital or otherwise.

Guitar Hero 3 launched 28th October and has since garnered $115 million for Activision whose chairman today revealed that Activision has shipped more of the Guitar Hero 3 game than any other in its history. In short order Guitar Hero 3 became the most searched for video game based on share of US Internet searches.

I've seen several posts circulating in the blogosphere postulating on the demise of Facebook given a drop in the sites traffic over August and September of this year. My immediate reaction was to turn to Hitwise data and provide a little more granularity to provide insight to the question of Facebook slowdown v. seasonality (my hypothesis on the recent drop in traffic).

Despite innovations in online maps, UK consumer demand for online maps has not grown in the past year. As reported in my Site Seeing column in today's Guardian, Multimap remains the #1 Maps website, based on share of UK visits, with most of its traffic coming from store locator services. Google Maps is #2, having overtaken Streetmap.co.uk and The AA’s Travelwatch in March.

Google Checkout recently launched in the UK and I wanted to share some statistics about the take up so far in the US where Google Checkout has been available for just less than a year and in the UK where it has just launched.

Yesterday I spoke at the the Millennials Conference in Los Angeles. I talked about some websites that have a high concentration of users in the 18-24 age group, and are enabling users to share content beyond the usual activities on social networking sites. 18-24 year-olds make up 19% of the adult online population, and based upon their website preferences, are much more interested in creating and sharing content than the average online user.

London - Experian Group, an Ireland-based provider of analytical and information services to organizations and consumers, announced on Thursday that it has acquired Hitwise, a website ratings and marketing information firm, for about $240 million in cash.

San Francisco - While traffic to "Web 2.0" sites -- like YouTube, Flickr and others that encourage users to upload their own media -- has increased dramatically, the percentage of these users actually contributing content to such sites remains slim, according to a new study from website ratings firm Hitwise.

This morning (very early this morning) I was interviewed on BBC TV for the World Business Report about Yahoo!'s earnings announcement. I wanted to share the updated search stats I pulled for the interview here and share some of my comments.

On Wednesday, April 11, MySpace blocked videos and slideshows hosted by Photobucket from appearing on the site due to an apparent violation of the MySpace terms of Service agreement. Did this blockage have any effect on Photobucket's traffic, and how much traffic do the two sites share?