The MySpace Search Engine

I've written a fair amount, including in the recent column on social media at the Search Insider Summit, how MySpace (along with other sites like YouTube, Amazon, and Second Life) should be considered a search engine. Hitwise, in its latest monthly newsletter, just backed that up.

Google (www.google.com) was responsible for 18.16 percent of the visits to the PlayStation website (www.playstation.com) for the week ending November 11, 2006. Other leading sites driving traffic to the Playstation website were Yahoo! Search (www.search.yahoo.com), which accounted for 5.40 percent of upstream visits and MySpace (www.myspace.com), accounting for 4.57 percent of upstream visits in the same time period.

Wow. Expect to see a lot more than that. And notice that MySpace is mentioned here, not MSN. All the search engines should be taking notice, including Google, which paid $1.65 billion for YouTube and did a $900 million rev share deal with MySpace (addressed in another recent column, in a way).