Comscore

Julee Morrison has been obsessed with Bon Jovi since she was a teenager. So when paid ads for fan sites started popping up on the 41-year-old Salt Lake City blogger's Facebook page, she was thrilled. She described herself as a "clicking fool," perusing videos and photos of the New Jersey rockers. Then it dawned on Morrison why all those Bon Jovi ads appeared every time she logged on to the social networking site. "Facebook is reading my profile, my interests, the people and pages I am 'friends' with, and targeting me," Morrison said.

The Kindle Fire appears to be burning up its competition — on the Android side, anyway. Amazon.com Inc.'s tablet computer is catching on in a big way in the U.S., accounting by end of February for 54.4% of tablets that run Google Inc.'s Android system software. That represented a near doubling of the Fire's Android market share since December, when it was at 29.4%, according to new data from ComScore Inc. The Fire first went on sale in November. In a way, the Kindle Fire is gobbling up the small fish in the pond — far outpacing Samsung's Galaxy Tab (15.4% of Android)

Facebook Inc., after eclipsing MySpace in global users last year, now leads its social-networking rival in the U.S. as well, according to research firm ComScore Inc. The Palo Alto, Calif., company had 70.28 million U.S. users last month, topping MySpace's 70.26 million, ComScore said. Facebook's users almost doubled from a year earlier, while MySpace lost 5%. Facebook, which became the top global social-networking site a year ago, had 307.1 million users worldwide in April, the Reston, Va.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Pinterest has begun offering businesses tools that help measure the number of visitors it sends their way, another step on the path to broadening its appeal with brands and making money. The free product, called Pinterest Web Analytics, gives businesses insight into how people interact with their content on Pinterest. The popular online bulletin board lets you collect and share images from around the Web by "pinning" them to virtual boards. It was the 28 th most visited website among U.S. Internet users in January with about 30 million unique visitors, according to research firm ComScore.

ComScore Inc., seeking to give its customers more detailed information on the habits of Web users, changed its method of measuring Internet searches to include queries sent to search engines by other websites. Under the new system, Google Inc.'s share of queries rose to 55.2% from 46.2% a year earlier. Yahoo Inc.'s share fell to 23.5% from 29.8% a year ago, the biggest decline among the top five search engines, Reston, Va.-based ComScore said Monday.

A new one-day record for online shopping was set Dec. 12, exactly a year after the previous peak was achieved, according to a firm that tracks Internet sales. On that day, $288 million worth of non-travel goods were sold on the Internet, according to ComScore Networks Inc., a Reston, Va., research firm. The former record, hit Dec. 12, 2001, was $262 million. Online sales of non-travel items from Nov. 1 through Dec. 13 total about $7.

LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, had 160 million monthly active users in November, according to the latest figures available. That was an increase of nearly 30 million from September when LinkedIn had more than 133 million users who logged in to the website at least once a month. The Mountain View, Calif., company announced the number, which was calculated by research firm comScore, after crossing the mark for 200 million registered users earlier this month. LinkedIn has registered 13 million users since November.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau raised fresh concerns Friday about the measurement of Internet users' behavior and called for two leading market research firms to submit to audits. The trade group's complaints about Web audience ratings issued by ComScore Inc. and Nielsen//NetRatings come as advertisers shift increasing amounts of money into online media.

Search engine Google took a big jump up in popularity last month. Reston, Va.-based ComScore Media Metrix reported that Google (www.google.com) was the fourth-most popular Web destination among Internet users in the United States in July, with an estimated 37.5 million visitors from home and work. Google climbed two spots from its June ranking, bumping aside the Web networks of media conglomerates Primedia Inc. (its best-known site is About.com) and Terra Lycos, the previous No. 5 and No.