Myspace-engine

If MySpace had a search engine, wouldn't that ruffle the feathers at Google, MSN and Yahoo? It's a question worth contemplating at a time when the online search industry's Big Three are spending billions to supply better search results, and in the process get marketers to spend more ad bucks on those search pages. Additionally, paid search -- estimated to be a $7 billion market this year -- could be the No. 1 revenue source for MySpace. You can bet that MySpace, the leading social networking site on the Web, will be making inroads into search soon. Rupert Murdoch is no dummy. Why else would his News pend nearly $600 million on MySpace and not go after the most lucrative and biggest part of the online ad pie?

As I pointed out in a recent column, MySpace is a whole new distribution platform that is changing the face of the Net. In March, MySpace recorded 19.4 billion page views vs. 13.7 billion at Google, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.   With MySpace's traffic so significant, I had a hunch that major sites like Google and Yahoo might also receive a lot of benefit from that traffic. That hunch was right. Google received 8.2% of its traffic partly from its search tools that appear on pages within MySpace, making the social network the No. 1 source of traffic to Google, according to Bill Tancer of online research firm Hitwise, who retrieved the data for me.

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