Thanks to Seth and the team at Majestic for allowing me to post these numbers. According to their research, about 1.3 million unique users visited Google’s Desktop Search page in the first two weeks of its release, with nearly half (640,000) downloading the application. Majestic also breaks out international numbers in its report, shown on this accompanying graph (click on it to enlarge it).
(Data from Comscore, a Majestic partner.)
Given the size of Google, those numbers sound unimpressive. If a low radar application like WinZip routes 450,000 downloads per week through download.com, then 320,000 for GDS at launch seems to indicate not huge initial demand for desktop search in general. My two cents.
Is that really a fair comparison?
GDS has been out for, what, a month or so?
WinZip is in version 9 and has been around for many years.
Plus unzipping files is something that many folks NEED to do, and — of equal importance — they KNOW they need. In contrast, not everyone understands the concept of a readily-searchable personal database of stuff.
A more fair comparison, IMHO, would be between Copernic Desktop Search and Google Desktop Search, which both were released publicly within weeks of each other, I believe. Not only is the release date close, but both are in the same space, are found via similar keywords, and both are in the same space. Apples to apples.
Grr. Too much pumpkin pie already, which has gone to that space in my stomach and also the space in my brain. It’s the same space, and is causing me to space out.
Hello John – You also likely think it would be interesting to compare GDS’ visit vs download ratio to other products with a similar amount of hype – maybe apple’s itunes? Comparison with Copernic would be interesting but CDS hardly had the hype, although it was out before GDS and many people like it a lot.