A posting from Nielsen Online which surfaced today suggests that the wall between Google and other search services is not necessarily as high as we may have thought. Apparently, search is just as imbalanced as the American tax system with, 20% of users making 80% of the searches out there, and these people are not necessarily married to Google. Moe to the point, “a third of all searchers make use of three or more search engines per month, and 30 percent of Google searchers specifically make use of Microsoft’s search engine.”  

The data sheds a light on something that the majority of the techies caught in this bubble of bleeding edge behaviors forget: the average user still does not even search in the way we do. When I want to search for something, I type my query into the address bar of either Chrome or Firefox. The majority of people out there seem to not even use the search bar in most browser. Instead (this is something I’ve witnessed time and again firsthand), people are ingrained in going to Google.com and searching from there. Thus we see a whole slew of …

We all have something called a “BS meter.” It is what starts ringing when you hear something that you know is malarkey. Mine went off today in response to a report that was published by Nielsen about video consumption. The important numbers can be found here. I’ll summarize the findings: only 1% of all watched video is online. Now, gut reaction, does that sound right? Or course not! Let’s take a look.

Most of the report (the full PDF is here), is filled with tidbits on television viewing, which is at an all time high of 153 hours a month average. I never watch TV, so I cannot comment on that, but it  seems consistent with what I have heard a dozen times. Whatever. The internet numbers are what we need to focus on. That one percent breaks down into 131 million people watching three hours of video a month. Sounds innocuous enough, until you begin to question where they received their data from. Do you think that they have any data for pirated content? I bet not, and that alone makes the statistic bogus.

In 2004, P2P accounted for an …