comScore just came out with their February search report and Bing captured 11.5% of the search market, up from 11.3% in January and 10.7% in December and 8% last May.

In a similar pattern to prior months, Yahoo lost market share and Google maintained their market share.

If Bing’s market share continues to grow at a 2% month-over-month rate and Yahoo’s declines at at 2% month-over-month rate, Bing will overtake Yahoo by the end of this year and hold a 14% overall market share.

Of course, this is all based on comScore data, which doesn’t reflect what many sites show in terms of where their search traffic comes from, which typically is dominated by Google.

Each month comScore comes out with their “Inside The Ratings” report which provides a high level view on traffic trends. Here is a summary of the latest report which compares month-over-month data:

• Tax sites surged in January, up 350%
• Travel grew 20% to 30%
• Career resources jumped 20%, as typically happens at the start of a new year
• FamilyLink.com grew 57%, 2nd month in a row that it has been the top gaining comScore site
• Ed.gov grew 55%
• BuddyTV grew 51%
• Travelocity grew 47%

Note: Our traffic estimates for the above sites can vary from comScore and other traffic research companies as our methodologies are not the same.

HomeAway today announced their acquisition of bed and breakfast website, BedandBreakfast.com. This acquisition continues to build on HomeAway’s strategy of providing lodging alternatives to hotels, as featured in their recent “Hotel Hell” Superbowl TV commerical.

BedandBreakfast.com adds about 10,000 B&B listings to HomeAway’s already massive directory of vacation rentals. Both companies are based in Austin Texas and terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Top sites in the Bed and Breakfast category include:

• BedandBreakfast.com (bedandbreakfast.com website traffic)
• Bed & Breakfast Inns Online (owned by Internet Brands, bbonline.com website traffic)
• InnSite Bed and Breakfasts (innsite.com website traffic)
• BnBFinder.com (bnbfinder.com website traffic)
• Inns.com (inns.com website traffic)
• The Inn Keeper (theinnkeeper.com website traffic)
• Inn Seekers (innseekers.com website traffic)
• FindBedandBreakfast.com (findbedandbreakfast.com website traffic)

HomeAway has shown nice traffic growth over the past year and having one more site in their network will only continue to build on their commanding lead in this category.

We are excited to announce that we have updated our free web traffic estimation website with more charts, traffic stats, rankings, and web analytics. This update includes a revision to our traffic estimator algorithm and a new “Top Websites” section.

Since 2004, TrafficEstimate.com has been providing estimations of monthly worldwide visits to websites. Please note that visits are different than visitors (or unique visitors) since visitors often “re-visit” websites each month. Sites like Compete.com and Quantcast.com provide estimates on USA unique visitors so the TrafficEstimate quantities can’t be compared apples-to-apples.

We have updated our visitor estimation algorithm to produce more accurate estimates. It had been a while since the algorithm had been updated. We calibrated it by using many verified website traffic stats from the biggest website (Google.com) all the way down to smaller sites with 10,000 visits per month or less. Although the algorithm isn’t accurate for all sites, we think it is more accurate than any other free traffic estimation service out there. Sites with high technology demographics, for example, will have estimates that are too high, and there are some sites we tested that show numbers that are below actual, but we have done our best to provide a service that provides a useful approximation across the Internet spectrum.

On our website profile pages you’ll find a lot more information than before. You can use this info to get a snapshot of your website as compared to your competition. You can also use this info to review potential website and domain acquisitions, understand your search engine optimization, analysis site statistics, and review related sites. What did we add? Here’s a partial list:

• Updated TrafficEstimate chart
• Statistics and charts from Google, Alexa, Quantcast, and Compete.com
• Related websites
• Keyword density analytics
• Company contact info
• Competitor lists
• Category pages with similar sites
• Relevant news and Twitter feeds

We also created a new section called Top Websites which includes a list of our top 10,000 sites. In creating this list, we removed many sites with high traffic that we considered irrelevant (which we won’t define at this time – but think of “sketchy” sites). Soon we’ll expand the list and clean it up a bit to be even more relevant.

Start now by checking out the website traffic and analytics of your competition. If you have some ideas for how we can improve this website please email us at admin[at]trafficestimate.com. Note that the company contact information on our profile pages comes from Alexa.com so please visit their website to update your information if inaccurate.

Thanks!

The TrafficEstimate.com Team.

There has been huge traffic growth for Techcrunch over the past year. The team recently thanked their readers and sponsors and noted that the site now gets 30 million page views and 9 million unique visits per month. In terms of News & Media Blogs, it certainly is one of the best around.

Congrats Team Techcrunch. Keep up the good work.

Interesting article on how Compete.com gets some of its web traffic data. Apparently it’s partially from a popular toolbar that violated its privacy notice.

We were recently pointed to this post from last month by Ben Edelman, a Harvard privacy advocate. In it, he details the data the Upromise toolbar collects and sends out. This toolbar is used by college students looking for savings on various items across the web, and can be quite useful. But until a few weeks ago, it appears they were also sending web browsing and more personal data to Compete without anyone’s knowledge.

via How Does Compete Get Its Web Traffic Data? At Least One Way Sounds Very Sketchy.

Barclays Capital recently came out with their February “Internet Data Book.” The report provides up-to-date statistics on the Internet industry overall, and more specifically on the 13 companies in their coverage universe and covers financial metrics and valuation, Internet usage, online advertising, mobile, e-commerce, online travel, and company-specific information and models.

What is interesting about this report is that Facebook, for the first time ever, passed up Google to become the top US-based site for Page Views in January. Facebook traffic was 52 billion page views compared to Google’s traffic of 43 billion page views.

Even more interesting was Facebook’s year-over-year growth rate, which was 172% versus Google’s 27%. Even though, Google is still #1 in visits (Facebook is #4), Facebook’s growth rate there all but assures that it will become the number 1 site in terms of visits in just a matter of months. If you model out the January growth rates, Facebook is set to pass Google for US Visitors by October of this year.

The same trend is happening worldwide, though, it’s going to take more time for Facebook to make up ground there.

Techcrunch has a good article on Howcast’s video streaming growth (25 million streams/month). As much as that is, it’s still a small piece of the pie. And Howcast’s website traffic is still tiny compared to how-to category leader eHow.

Everyday Health has filed an S-1 with the SEC to raise $100 million through an IPO.

Everday Health, formerly known as Waterfront Media, runs a network of sites, some of which are through partnerships with existing brands, including the successful South Beach Diet.

EverydayHealth.com appears to be the company’s own venture that is leveraging their existing presence in the health and wellness space. The EverydayHealth website traffic already appears to dominate their other sites including SouthBeachDiet.com, WhatToExpect.com & Revolution Health which merged with Waterfront Media in October 2008.

Leveraging other people’s brands to eventually create your own appears to be a good strategy for them to break into a competitive space that includes WebMD, LiveStrong.com and Health.com.

Local websites, such as Yelp, are red hot and so are the data providers that help power their content. Today Localeze announced that they have partnered with Microsoft’s search engine Bing to use their premium business content.

In related news, AT&T launched their own local site, Buzz. Here is more coverage from Forbes. It will be interesting to see how effectively Buzz is able to compete with Yelp.