• StraightUpSearch, Friday, January 4, 2008 1:45 PM

In the midst of the industry's most nonproductive week, OneUpWeb's Matt uncovered an interesting stat hidden in comScore's latest U.S. search rankings report. While searches on Google.com fell by about 4% in November, queries on Google's network of partner sites (including Blogger pages and YouTube) actually increased by more than 9%.

Users conducted about 1.4 billion searches on these Google partner sites -- roughly 500 million more queries than across Time Warner/AOL's entire search network, and 400 million more than across Microsoft's entire network. And if the searches across Google's expanded network continue to grow, these partner sites may actually end up eclipsing Yahoo's query volume.

According to Matt, the popularity of user-generated content, social networking and blogging is what's driving this phenomenal growth. "As social media continues to strengthen its foothold in the online marketplace so too will the presence and might of Google partner sites."

Read the whole story at StraightUpSearch »