While there may be some dispute about the origins of the saying: “there are three kinds of lies, lies, damned lies and statistics” there is little disagreement about its general truthfulness. It seems particularly appropriate in regard to Yelp’s unique visitors.

Yesterday Yelp.com announced at SMX East that they had 38 million uniques on the desktop and it picqued my curiosity. Yelp.com has done a great job of generating reviews and adding value around them and I have been following them over the years as both a user and a professional, watching thier efforts to move from a niche restaurant site in the major markets to a broad based general site. Have they moved out of the niche and into the mainstream? Certainly 38 million uniques would indicate so.

But I was curious for some verification of Yelp’s numbers so I went to Quantcast, Compete and Comscore to see if I could independantly confrim them. The results, far from enlightening, illustrate the many ways that unique visitors can be counted.

Source	Yelp Uniques	Chart (click to view larger)
Yelp	38 Million
ComScore	24 Million
Quantcast	12.6 Million
Compete	10.1 Million

Your thoughts?

A great inforgraphic designed by George Kokkinidis in his attempt at redesigning the original chart from The Guardian. Ah what a web we weave.

Searching with Google on your mobile phone can be an eye-opening experience. Now your phone’s camera can even help to find out more about the world around you.

Back in December we introduced Google Goggles on Android: it lets you search by taking pictures. Today, we’re excited to announce that Goggles is now a feature of Google Mobile App for iPhone. Google Mobile App already lets you speak your queries, and it can also use your phone’s location to give you more relevant search results.

In the new version of Google Mobile App just tap on the camera button to search using Goggles. Goggles will analyze the image and highlight the objects it recognizes — just click on them to find out more. You can see how this works in this short video:

Computer vision is a hard problem and Google Goggles is still a Labs product. It works well for things such as landmarks, logos and the covers of books, DVDs and games. However, it doesn’t yet work for some things you might want to try like animals, plants or food.

Google Mobile App with Google Goggles is now available in the Apple App Store. Just search for “Google Mobile App” and download the latest version – it’s free. It will gradually be appearing in all App Stores around the world starting from today.

Goggles is enabled only for English-speaking users, and since it requires an auto-focusing camera it is supported only on iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 running iOS 4 or above. Visit our Help Center to learn more or send us your feedback and questions in our Help Forum.

So step away from your computer, get your Goggles on, and search the world around you.

Posted by Milan Broum, Software Engineer, Google Mobile Team