Is Google Buzz Dead Already?

Where’s the buzz on Google Buzz? According to online ad network Chitika, the buzz is gone, dead. Chitika says this is true both in general web searches, as well as search activity across its network of 80,000 sites.

Chitika’s blog post explains more, with numbers from its own network:

February 9th, 2010 � the day Buzz was launched � the search engines lit up with queries. The Chitika network saw about 1,500 searches that day for the term “Google Buzz,” approximately 15 times the number of searches for “Twitter.”

However, those searches dropped off quickly � on February 10th, there were 580 searches; on the 11th, 147. From the 12th on � only three days removed from Buzz’s much-hyped launch � searches for Google Buzz failed to break three digits, and in most cases elicited less than 10 searches per day.

Chitika also points out that Google’s own Insights for Search research tool tells a similar story. Here’s a comparison showing Twitter and Google Buzz web search activity around the world over the past 90 days. (Twitter is the blue line, Google Buzz the red.)

That’s general web search. Insights for Search also shows the same trend using its News Search filter — for a brief time at its launch, Google Buzz saw more news search activity than Twitter, but interest in Buzz is all but gone now.

And at the risk of piling on, even Google Trends shows the same pattern.

Google Buzz launched last month and immediately garnered a variety of reactions from users — some good, some bad, and some that eventually prompted Google to apologize and make changes to how Buzz works. But the ultimate feedback might be happening now, in the form of the web’s decreasing interest in the product overall.

Then again, it may just be that Facebook and Twitter have entrenched themselves as the dominant and almost unassailable leaders in social networking. Both have faced their share of challengers, and so far, have fended off every one.

Your turn: Are you using Google Buzz? Do you use it more or less than you did when it launched?