Hitwise (and everyone else) is missing something regarding blog search

All right, I'm a little slow to comment on this, but I finally checked out the source of the recent hoopla about Google Blog Search surpassing Technorati, according to Hitwise.

I'll ignore for a moment that, like all of Hitwise's reports, we're talking about US-only visitors, which means less and less these days. (Most US-based consumer web properties are getting only 50% of their traffic from US-based users these days.*)

Anyway, the chart:



So, the big news is that purple line went past the green line there at the end. But notice the orange line that's neck-and-neck with Technorati up until early November? That's search.blogger.com. Search.blogger.com is Google Blog Search! It's the same product at a different URL and with a different skin.

Seems to me, you should add those two together, shouldn't you? I dunno, maybe not. But I thought it was worth noting.

* I don't know if that's true, but anecdotal evidence suggests it's fairly consistent across many.