Logo

travel, hotel and booking Information

Home | Directory | Guide | Blog

News Media Web Sites Vary Dramatically in Speed and Reliability, Reports Keynote

News Media Web Sites Vary Dramatically in Speed and Reliability, Reports Keynote

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 23, 2004--Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority(R), broadened its index coverage today with the announcement of the world's first news media Web transaction index. Named "The Keynote News Media Web Transaction Performance Index," this new index tracks the transaction speed and reliability of 19 leading news media Web sites.
-- Keynote Expands Index Coverage with the Launch of the World's First News Media Web Transaction Performance Index

Hotel Booking -- CBSNews.com, CNBC.com and BBC.com Tops in Speed; CNN.com, CNBC.com and NBC.com Get High Marks for Reliability

The research study also demonstrates that travel agents are increasing their reliance on GDS systems for hotel information. Nearly 90% of travel agents say that they use their GDS and GDS shopping displays as much or more today than two years ago. Travel agents also report increased use of hotel property Web sites compared to two years ago. Travel agents are less likely now to use printed hotel directories, direct mail, fax, and the phone to gather information about hotels.

Travel Agency -- Impact of Widely Diverse Performance Broadly Felt as 80% of Americans Turn to Web for News

No, the Ask Toolbar does not monitor or report information about where you are traveling or what you do on Web sites.

Cheap Hotel -- 19 Leading Broadcast and Print Sites Ranked for Speed and Reliability

For the second year in a row, Venere.com has been voted best hotel booking web site by the leading Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. Journalists at Aftenposten conducted a test among 23 hotel booking engines. The test was based on a combination of hotel price against a set of web site criteria usability, maps, pictures, payment method, quality of hotel information and hotel policies. Venere.com came out as the winner for online bookings, hrs.de was second and hotwire.com third.

Flight Booking As people turn increasingly to online news sites for breaking news and information, Keynote's new index will be a valuable resource for both the news media and consumers. The news media industry can use the index as a reliable way to compare themselves to competitors and to improve their own online performance, while consumers can use the index as a way to decide which sites deliver news the most efficiently.

In speed and availability, Keynote reported that retail sites averaged 2.11 seconds to download the home page and were available 98.5% of the time.

Travel Agent In its inaugural week, Keynote's News Media Index showed a wide range of variation in the speed and reliability of the sites measured. The index measures the complete end-to-end process of going to a news site, selecting a particular news-related category, searching for and selecting an article.

OAG, the global travel and transport information company, announced today the addition of a new online hotel £ook and book service on its travel web site, www.oag.com. World Choice Travel, a division of the Travelocity Partner Network, powers the reservation system.

Hotel Chicago The overall average speed for completing this transaction was 8.14 seconds. While the top site for performance, CBSNews.com, delivered the entire experience in less than 5.0 seconds, the slowest site, ChicagoTribune.com, averaged over 14.0 seconds. During the week, a few sites took as long as 25.8 seconds, but most measurements fell between 4.0 and 18.0 seconds.

Online Booking The transaction reliability of the measured sites also varied greatly. While the index average for reliability was a not so terrific 97.12%, the difference between the most reliable and least reliable sites was a significant 6.4% (99.91% for CNN.com vs. 93.51% for WashingtonPost.com). Reliability measurements also showed a greater degree of variation by site and by time. This somewhat erratic behavior indicates that the time of day is likely to have a significant impact on a user's chance of enjoying a smooth and successful completion of their desired task.

Travel Health Insurance "While the timeliness of news sites continues to improve every year, some sites now deliver consistently reliable and high levels of performance, while others are still struggling to reconcile the conflicting demands of timeliness and responsiveness," said Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst in Keynote's public services division. "Given the competitive nature of news sites, there is little to keep the allegiance of users. If someone is looking for a particular news item, switching to another site is a natural response when their first choice takes too long to download."

Hotel Reservation Recent research suggests that millions of Americans receiving their news online are affected by the variable site performance shown on the index. In June 2004, Harris Interactive found that fully 80% of U.S. adults now use the Internet to obtain news online. The same study found that 50% of Americans turn to the Web sites of leading newspapers for news, while 37% turn to the Web sites run by television networks. Finally, underscoring the dramatic reliance by executives on news-oriented Web sites, the results of a similar survey conducted by Harris Interactive for The Wall Street Journal and released in May 2004 found that 84% of executives read news online "often" or "sometimes." Fully 25% of executives said Internet news sites are now their most important sources for news, only 4% below their ranking of national newspapers at 29%.

London Hotel Booking The Keynote News Media Web Transaction Performance Index is the first of its kind to systematically measure the speed and reliability of leading news media Web sites for performing common multi-step tasks. To measure this particular index, Keynote's measurement computers in 10 cities around the U.S. "click through" the same steps an actual person might perform: entering the particular URL of the news site they wish to visit, clicking on a specific news sub-topic (such as local news, world news or politics), logging in using account information where necessary and selecting on a particular news item.

Discount Travel The 19 Web sites that comprise the News Media Web Transaction Index include the following: abcnews.com (NYSE:DIS), bbc.com, boston.com (NYSE:NYT), cbsnews.com (NYSE:VIA), chicagotribune.com (NYSE:TRB), cnbc.com, cnn.com (NYSE:TWX), csmonitor.com, foxnews.com (NYSE:NWS), nbc.com (NYSE:GE), latimes.com (NYSE:TRB), mercurynews.com (NYSE:KRI), msnbc.com, nytimes.com (NYSE:NYT), sfgate.com, sky.com (NZSX:SKY), usatoday.com (NYSE:GCI), washingtonpost.com (NYSE:WPO), wsj.com (NYSE:DJ).

Orlando Hotel The Keynote News Media Web Transaction Performance Index will be published weekly on Keynote's Web site.

Booking Agency Keynote has historically seen an improvement in overall performance results, over time, whenever it has launched a new vertical-based Web transaction performance index; in this case the online news media industry. The goal of the index is to help the news media industry measure and manage the performance of its Web sites and optimize the experience of people seeking news online.

International Travel Medical The Keynote News Media Transaction Performance Index is designed to reflect the speed and reliability of the most well known news media Web sites with a large online presence. Going beyond home page performance, the news media transaction index provides deep insight into the performance of these high traffic news media Web sites.

New York Hotel Here is the summary data for the first week's worth of results from Keynote's News Media Web Transaction Performance Index --

Online Travel Booking KEYNOTE NEWS MEDIA WEB TRANSACTION PERFORMANCE INDEX
Week of June 14, 2004, Measurements performed 8:00 AM to midnight
eastern time

 TRANSACTION SPEED TRANSACTION RELIABILITY (in seconds) (in percent) Site Site Rank Speed Rank Reliability 1 CBSNews.com 4.67 1 CNN.com 99.91 2 CNBC.com 4.77 2 CNBC.com 99.64 3 BBC.com 5.81 3 NBC.com 99.02 4 Mercurynews.com 5.83 4 BBC.com 98.31 5 SFgate.com 6.05 5 CSMonitor.com 98.22 6 NBC.com 7.20 6 Mercurynews.com 97.93 7 CNN.com 7.47 7 SFgate.com 97.88 NEWS INDEX 8.14 8 USAToday.com 97.74 8 Boston.com 8.28 NEWS INDEX 97.12 9 NYTimes.com 8.40 9 Sky.com 96.88 10 USAToday.com 8.45 10 Boston.com 96.73 11 CSMonitor.com 9.82 11 NYTimes.com 96.57 12 WashingtonPost.com 9.97 12 CBSNews.com 96.17 13 SKY.com 12.26 13 FoxNews.com 96.04 14 FoxNews.com 14.09 14 ChicagoTribune.com 94.08 15 ChicagoTribune.com 14.19 15 WashingtonPost.com 93.51

Travel Medical Insurance Source: Keynote Systems, Inc.

Miami Hotel Note: In any given week the aggregated data for all 19 news media Web sites on the index may not appear in print due to insufficient
collection of data points for one or more sites.

Air Deccan Booking About Keynote's News Media Web Transaction Performance Index

Las Vegas Nevada Travel Keynote pioneered the use of vertical indices and benchmarks for Web application performance over five years ago. The data used to produce the index for a given week is taken from actual online transactions Keynote's automated measurement computers execute and measure from 10 U.S. cities (Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston and Dallas) on an hourly basis Monday to Sunday from 8:00 a.m. to midnight (eastern time).

Las Vegas Nv Hotel Keynote transaction measurement computers are placed on the most widely used, familiar and recognizable Internet backbone and service providers in these cities including Uunet/Worldcom, Sprint, AT&T and Qwest. Additionally, Keynote's global network of measurement computers run standard Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers on Windows/2000 to obtain the most accurate and representative transaction performance data possible today.

Hotel Florence Booking Online For the Keynote News Media Web Transaction Performance Index, each of the measurements begin by launching the browser, selecting the starting URL for the specific Web site, and then conducting the following:

Orlando Travel -- Clicking on a specific news sub-topic (such as local news, world news or politics)

Hilton Hotel -- Logging in using account information where necessary

Booking Delta Com -- Selecting on the first news item returned

Travel Insurance Online Complete index data that includes not only the aggregated and limited time-frame results as published here, but every data point taken 24/7 along with page, network component, content and error detail, is available from Keynote on a subscription basis for $3,885.00 per month. An aggregate view of the data is available for $895.00 per month.

London Hotel Background on Keynote's Web Performance Indices

Online Hotel Booking Keynote's Web transaction indices leverage Keynote's long history and experience developing Internet performance indices. Keynote launched the world's first Web performance indices that assess page download performance (as opposed to transaction performance), known as The Keynote Business 40 Internet Performance Index (measurements over T1 and T3 connections) and The Keynote Consumer 40 Internet Performance Index (measurements over dial-up and broadband connections). Keynote also launched the world's first transaction performance index, The Keynote Web Broker Trading Index. All today are considered the 'gold standard' for Web performance benchmarking.

Travel Insurance In addition to The Keynote News Media Web Transaction Performance Index, Keynote's growing line of transaction indices include: The Keynote Web Broker Trading Index, The Keynote E-Banking Transaction Performance Index, The Keynote E-Commerce Transaction Performance Index, The Keynote Travel & Hospitality Web Transaction Performance Index (includes leading airline, hotel and online travel agency Web sites) and The Keynote E-Government Transaction Performance Index.

Paris Hotel Customers can use Keynote's growing line of industry-specific Web transaction indices to assess Web transaction performance against internal benchmarks and against competitors. Customers can then leverage Keynote's additional monitoring, performance management, load, content and usability testing services to improve the overall performance of their e-business applications and infrastructure.

Airline Booking To build and maintain its growing line of Web performance indices, Keynote uses its unparalleled global infrastructure of over 1,600 strategically and statistically located measurement, testing and diagnostic computers representing Internet performance from 50 metropolitan areas worldwide.

Travel Trailer Detailed information regarding the methodology behind Keynote's Web performance indices can be found at: www.keynote.com/downloads/whitepapers/webtxn-methodology052704.pdf.

San Francisco Hotel General information about Keynote's performance indices can be found at www.keynote.com/solutions/solutions_pm_performance_indices_tpl.html

Air Ticket Booking About Keynote

Cheap Travel Founded in 1995, Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority(R), is the worldwide leader in Web performance measurement and management services that improve the quality of e-business. Keynote's services enable corporate enterprises to monitor, benchmark, test, diagnose and optimize their e-business systems both inside and outside the firewall. Over 2,100 corporate IT departments and 19,000 individual subscribers rely on the company's easy-to-use and cost-effective services to increase revenues and reduce downtime costs, without requiring additional complex and costly software implementations.

Bangkok Hotel Keynote is The Internet Performance Authority due to the company's global infrastructure of over 1,600 measurement computers in more than 50 cities worldwide that capture and store on a daily basis over 40 million Internet performance measurements, frequent media citations quoting Keynote's Web performance data and analysis and the company's growing range of market-leading Web performance indices for vertical markets (http://www.keynote.com/solutions/solutions_pi_index.html).

Music Booking Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.

Travel And Tourism Keynote, The Internet Performance Authority and Perspective are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

New York City Hotel Contacts

Air Asia Ticket Booking
Keynote Systems
Dan Berkowitz, 650-403-3305
dberkowitz@keynote.com
Della Lowe, 650-403-3233
dlowe@keynote.com

[ Comment, Edit or Article Submission ]

Share this:

Add To Slashdot Stumble This Digg This Add To Del.icio.us Add To Reddit Add To Yahoo MyWeb Add To Google Bookmarks Add To Furl Fav This With Technorati Add To Newsvine Add To Bloglines Add To Ask Add To Windows Live

More about:

Nov December 2008 Jan
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
  1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31      

travel, hotel and booking Information Blog on Technorati Related Blog of travel, hotel and booking Information on Sphere