Local search site CitySquares has made a very cool acquisition. They’ve purchased an online retail directory, Yokel.com.

Yokel is designed to help you find which local stores carry specific products or brands. It was the brainchild of Scott Randall and Don Zereski and launched in 2006.

CitySquares has been one of the fastest growing local search engines. It began in the Northeast and quickly expanded nationwide. Acquisitions such as Yokel will help advance CitySquares’ place in the fast-growing local search landscape.

After years of speculation, Apple is finally expected to unveil its new tablet product at the end of the month. There is great anticipation over the new device, with rumors, predictions and punditry littering the blogosphere.

Apple fanboys and girls can’t get enough. They’re turning to the search engines to gobble up any ounce of information about the new gadget. Hitwise has the data:

If you go to Google.com/news and scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll now see Fast Flip. This is a visual-based news platform that was launched into Labs last September. It’s designed to enable users to read the news similar to how they would a print edition – there are pages, that you flip through.

Google was keen to point out that Fast Flip remains in Labs. But it is a feature that is quickly growing. Last month, 55 resources were added to Fast Flip.

This does appear to be an attempt by Google to coddle traditional news publishers. Many of them are losing ad revenues and subscriptions due to the dang internet. Perhaps displaying the news online in a format that mimics print will allay fears. It will only do so if adopted by web users, however. And for that, we shall see.

Before 2009 came to a close, Google provided a look (as always) at the most searched for terms of the year. It showed the top ten fastest rising and fastest falling terms on both a global scale, and in the U.S. Globally, "Michael Jackson" was the fastest rising, while "Beijing 2008" was the fastest falling. In the U.S., "Twitter" was the fastest rising (just above "Michael Jackson", and "John McCain" was the fastest falling (just over the Olympics).

Google has now shared some other interesting facts related to search behavior over the course of 2009. These are:

- Proportion of Google users in the U.S. making over one query per day: 7 out of 10

- Proportion of Google users in the U.S. making over 10 queries per day: 1 out of 7

- Fraction of Google queries, duplicates excluded, never seen before: More than 1/3

- Fraction of Google queries, duplicates included, never seen before: More than 1/5

- Country with the greatest increase in Google web search traffic in 2009 vs. 2008: Indonesia

- Approximate percentage of Internet users in Indonesia: 11.1%

- Average amount of time it takes a user to finish entering a query: 9 seconds

- Average amount of time it takes Google to answer a query: Less than 1/4 second

- Number of search quality improvements made by Google in 2009: 540, ~1.5 each day

Proportion of Google result pages that show a map in search results: 1 in – 13

- Average increase in driving distance on weekends vs. weekdays on Google Maps: 11km

- Median distance from a user’s location to ice skating rinks found on Google Maps: 30km

- Median distance from a user’s location to ski resorts found on Google Maps: 300km

Google notes that most of the stats are based on U.S. traffic during weekdays. World Bank, World Development Indicators are cited for the Indonesia stats.

Statistics like these provide for an interesting reflection of search on a broad scale. Those directly connected to the search and marketing industries may sometimes have a hard time stepping out of the box and looking at things from the average person’s perspective. Information like this kind of puts thing into that perspective.

For example, it’s hard for me to imagine a weekday where I would make less than 10 queries in a day, but according to Google, only one out of seven make over 10 per day. Does that make search any less of a factor? No. It doesn’t have any effect on the importance of being there when consumers do search.
 

Related Articles:

> Google Year-End Zeitgeist Published

> Bing Searches in 2009

> Google’s Year in Custom Search