I just finished reading Bill Tancer’s book Click: What We Do Online and Why it Matters. If you’re interested in web trends, search engine marketing, or you’re just curious about how people use the internet, it’s well worth a read.

Bill Tancer is the General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise. I had an account with Hitwise during my time as Online Group Senior Editor at Future Publishing, and I have to say it’s a great online intelligence service. Here in the UK they track traffic details of 8 million internet users (in the US it’s 10 million). That’s a big sample base.

Bill’s book Click shares many insights into online behaviour that he has gleaned from this valuable data. Highlights for me include:

• The mystery of why teenage girls start searching for Prom dresses in January, way before the Prom season in May.
• His insights into the celebrity worship syndrome that has driven so much traffic to the likes of PerezHilton and TMZ (I saw this phenomenon first hand when I worked on developing the MusicToob site).
• The single statistic that ‘How to…’ queries account for 3% of all search queries in the US.
• His insights into social media and the so-called ‘super connectors’ that can push aspiring music artists over the tipping point.

You can buy Click for a good price at Amazon and no doubt many other excellent places.

Have you read Click? Share your views in the comments below.

The new search deal between Yahoo and Microsoft is unsurprisingly drawing a lot of attention from the blogosphere and the mainstream press right now. But while it’s big news for these two companies, it also highlights the fact that they are several steps behind Google.

While the Yahoo deal provides Microsoft with a 28% share of search in the US (and just 7% in the UK), the search battle has moved elsewhere. Google has used its massive dominance in search, and the huge revenues it derives from it ($21bn in 2008), to fund innovation. Having conquered web search, there are new areas that Google now wants to attack, and in the search space the most important of these is real-time search.

There was another piece of news last week that sign-posts this new zeitgeist in search, and it didn’t involve Microsoft or Yahoo. This was the re-launch of Twitter’s home page.

Twitter's new homepage is all about real-time search.

Twitter is fully positioning itself as a Discovery Engine. Notice its new tag line?: ‘Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.’ This is getting close to Google’s mission statement: ‘To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’

In 2009 one of Google’s priorities is how to comprehensively integrate real-time search into its own listings, beyond the limited use of the Twitter API it currently uses. We know this because Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer says so:

We think the real-time search is incredibly important and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of us finding out something like, you know, is this conference today any good? Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley? You can actually look at tweets and see those sorts of patterns, so there’s a lot of useful information about real time and your actions that we think ultimately will reinvent search.

And in May 2009, at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, Google co-founder Larry Page had this to say about real-time search:

I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real-time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. Now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about real-time.

So while Microsoft and Yahoo arrive on the mainstream search battlefield, ten years after Google launched its groundbreaking search engine, Google’s troops have already moved on. Look out for a deal between Google and Twitter within the next 6-12 months.

In ten years time, if they’re still around, Microsoft and Yahoo will be regretting not fighting the real-time search battle sooner.

More blog posts on the Twitter homepage re-launch and real-time search:

• Twitter launches new homepage – TheNextWeb.com
• Twitter promotes search on its new homepage – Econsultancy blog
• New Twitter Hompage – John Battelle’s Search Blog
• Video of Danny Sullivan, Matt Cutts and others discussing real-time search