Anybody in the online business game knows that Google is by far the most-used search engine out there. But by just how much? Well, to cite one recent report (by the online information company known as Hitwise), Google accounts for a whopping 63.55 percent of all U.S. searches as of September 2007.

Hitwise, an Experian subsidiary and self-described “online competitive intelligence service” based out of New York, also reported that Yahoo is running a strong second place with 22.55 percent. MSN Search is in third place with 7.83 percent, right ahead of Ask.com’s 4.32 percent. “The remaining 49 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.75 percent of U.S. searches,” according to the report.

No surprises there. However, a less well-known result of the Hitwise report is just what people are searching for when they use these search engines. According to BNET’s analysis of the report, “nearly half (44%) of the visitors to Health and Medical sites come from a search engine query.”

Following closely behind is Travel (32.5%), Shopping and Classifieds (25.5%), News and Media (20.9%), Entertainment (20.8%), and Business & Finance (17%). Despite the fact that Business & Finance is the runt of the pack, it nevertheless represents the fastest growing category in search engine traffic; year over year traffic in this category grew a whopping 30.6%, while Health & Medical (the top-searched category) grew a paltry 5.8%.

Read the original Hitwise report here.

Thanks to BNET’s Jonathan Haeber for breaking the news.

Google, the giant that towers over the Internet, is getting into the Green Game. From yesterday’s New York Times:

Google said it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars, part of that to hire engineers and energy experts to investigate alternative energies like solar, geothermal and wind power. The effort is aimed at reducing Google’s own mounting energy costs to run its vast data centers, while also fighting climate change and helping to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

“We see technologies we think can mature into very capable industries that can generate electricity cheaper than coal,” said Larry Page, a Google founder and president of products, “and we don’t see people talking about that as much as we would like.”

The initiative, which Google is calling RE < C, using mathematical symbols to denote “renewable energy cheaper than coal,” will be based in Google’s research and development group.

The company also said that Google.org, the philanthropic for-profit subsidiary that Google seeded in 2004 with three million shares of its stock, would invest in energy start-ups.

Google says its goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy — enough to power the city of San Francisco — more cheaply than coal-generated electricity. The company predicted that this can be accomplished in “years, not decades.”

Certainly, this comes as no surprise to industry watchers. As the leader of arguably the world’s most essential industry, as well as one of the world’s largest companies to boot, it’s in Google’s best interests to be at the forefront of all new technology. (The political advantages certainly don’t hurt, either.)

But is the company large and established enough to take on this bold new frontier?

For some Wall Street analysts, the most relevant question is not whether Google can save the world, but whether the company’s idealism may ultimately distract it from its core businesses of organizing the world’s information and selling online ads.

Hmm. Somehow, we don’t think they’re too worried.

Writing in today’s Washington Post, Mr. Paul Farhi brings up an interesting point about many of the companies that currently dominate the online business world. To paraphrase: Some of these new company names are getting pretty crazy.

Among the many things the Internet has added recently to contemporary life, there is this: Many grown-ups now sound like babbling toddlers when speaking about the digital world — because many corporate names now have the ring of a collection of Dr. Seuss characters.

Friends tell friends about the hot new videos on Bebo and Joost, or Hulu and Revver. They buy movie tickets on Fandango, trade songs on Kazaa and find amusing news items on Fark. Zug is a comedy site, Yelp is a review site, Woozyfly a music-sharing site. Zune? Not a Web site at all, but rather a music player.

There’s Miva (for searches and contextual ads) and Apahcinc (another search engine), Tucows (business-to-business advertising) and Babooshnik (games). There’s Furl.net and Spurl.net, and if you don’t know what they do, you can ask Skaffe or Sporge to help you find that information.

This is something that folks in the younger generation take for granted. For kids who grew up on Napster and iTunes, the names KaZaa and Zune don’t even raise an eyebrow. But for those people who grew up with General Motors and IBM? It certainly must take some getting used to.

So why the rampant cuteness? Is the idea to make tech-related companies feel warm and fuzzy and not so sterile and impersonal?

Many tech companies tend to follow two naming strategies these days, says Anthony Shore, global director of naming and writing at Landor Associates, a San Francisco design company: the “nonsense” name (Joost) and names that use familiar-but-misspelled words (Flickr).

Shore, for one, likes neither strategy: “It just feels like they’re throwing in the towel. It’s easy to find an existing word and drop out a letter. It’s easy to come up with arbitrary sounds, or to just add an ‘oo.’ It’s far more difficult to come up with names with real words that have meanings and connections with people.”

It’s definitely an interesting read. Check it out here.

Once again, we turn to About.com’s Ana Rincon for insight into one of the key elements of running a successful and self-sustaining online business.

This time, Ms. Rincon provides a rundown of website affiliate programs, and explains how an aspiring web entrepreneur can use them to his or her advantage.

From the article:

Don’t have a product or service of your own to sell? It’s still possible to make money by selling someone else’s product. One way of doing this is by becoming an affiliate of another e-commerce site.

Under an affiliate program, an Internet merchant pays you to send people to their site. Some will pay you a percentage of sales resulting from your referral. Others will pay a specific amount per sale, click-through, or other action originating on your site. Some programs track sales from your referrals for the life of a customer. Others pay you on purchases made by a referral for a limited time only.

Ms. Rincon goes on to list some of the more effective affiliate partners out there, as well as providing a brief list of “Tips and Tricks”:

Don’t create a Web page that is simply a list of affiliate links. That kind of page looks amateurish and won’t bring you the kind of conversions you need.

Do create a site that adds value to your readers. For example, if you decide to join an affiliate program for a garden store, create a site that contains gardening tips, a calendar, and special landscape designs. Your readers will be much more likely to trust your recommendations.

Do focus on a niche market. An Amazon affiliate site with books on dozens of topics won’t sell as well as a site focusing on a specialty.

Don’t sit back and wait for traffic to come to you. Do market the site to your target audience. If you’ve selected your niche carefully, this will be easier to do.

Check out the original article here. You can also take a look at Aplus.Net’s own affiliate program here.

If you’re looking for an overview on the reviews greeting Amazon.com’s latest produict offering (the Kindle), this blog post by Dan Farber over at ZDNet does a great job of compiling some of the most interesting of them.

It also runs down some reactions to Facebook’s new Project Beacon. Some of the outcry against this new project is somewhat startling, and one has to wonder if Facebook foresaw the drawbacks in making traditionally private consumer info (such as what books or CDs one buys) so easily viewable to anyone interested in looking into it. Both perspectives on the issue make for an interesting read, at any rate.

And what’s more, this storm of praise and criticism comes just as The New York Times announces a partnership between Facebook and ABC News to offer political coverage:

ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership — the site’s first with a news organization — that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “U.S. Politics” category.

To underscore their collaboration, the two organizations will announce today that they are jointly sponsoring Democratic and Republican presidential debates in New Hampshire on Jan. 5, three days before the primary election there.

“Through this partnership, we want to extend the dialogue both before and after the debate,” said Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president for business development.

The announcements are another sign that news organizations are looking to capitalize on the potential power of Facebook, which began as a database of college friendships, and other social networking sites. Media companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post have produced pages for use on Facebook and some newspapers, magazines and television stations have recently invited users to join special pages that are set up to follow reporters’ political coverage. But ABC’s new relationship is intended to be deeper.

What do you think? Is Facebook biting off more than it can chew, or is blazing a trail that others are sure to follow? Any thoughts on the Amazon Kindle? As always, we’d love to hear any comments you may have.