The latest Compete.com numbers came out just before Christmas (Dec 23, for November), and while much of it is more of the same, a couple of interesting items caught our eye.  It’s a little hard to get a gauge on any trends, as Compete changed some methodology in August, except to say that Google is still far and away the leader.

Compete has been separating out the numbers for Club Live from the Live Search numbers for some time. The set of games you play on Club Live, using Live Search as an aid, are certainly a blatant attempt to “game” the system, but what’s interesting is how much play Club Live is getting.  As Jeremy Crane points out in his Compete blog post:

Club Live contributed 2.6ppts and nearly 300 million queries to MSN/Live. (To put things in perspective, Club Live gets more queries than either Ask or AOL.) Club Live continued to grow, with query volume up 3.4% versus the prior month and 7.2% for the year.

That Club Live gets more queries per month than either Ask.com or AOL is astounding, really.  A fairly unscientific observation: people who are attracted to winning Club Live games might be interested in using Search to get deals of other kinds (think Live Search cashback), or at least that’s what Live Search seems to be counting on.  Whether or not Club Live will make much of a difference in the long run remains to be seen, but anything that generates 300 million queries per month can’t hurt.