14 DAY TRIAL // The search share numbers for May from comScore came out a couple of days ago and, on the face of it, they showed a similar trend to the previous months. Bing and Yahoo are both shown gaining some market share, while Google lost a small amount. But a controversy has been brewing over the accuracy or rather the relevancy of the numbers.
For the past few months, Yahoo has started adding automated searches to some of its sites. For example, a ‘slideshow’ feature on Yahoo News does an automated search for each image a user views. The user doesn’t have any input in this search and may not even be aware that it’s happening. All these searches are being counted as legitimate, though, and it looks like Yahoo is raking up quite a few of them, enough to influence the market share numbers significantly.
And Yahoo is not the sole culprit; Microsoft has been doing something very similar with Bing even before the former started. Search Engine Land has a detailed analysis of how this works. So, for May 2010, in the US, both Yahoo and Bing have gained market share rising to 18.3 percent and 12.1 percent, respectively. At the same time, Google’s market share declined to 63.7 percent.
But the growing concern has prompted responses from both Yahoo and comScore. Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President of Yahoo Search Products, said: “As we push forward with new search features to bring relevant search results to more people in more places, we look forward to talking with folks like comScore and the industry at large about how to measure the new paradigm of search.”
ComScore has now vowed to change the way it measures search market share. “We want to ensure that we provide comprehensive and flexible measurement that meets the needs of the various constituencies in the digital marketplace... While we will maintain the current method through the end of the second quarter to avoid reporting disruptions, we will aim to implement proposed revisions in the third quarter, ideally starting with the release of July data in the first half of August,” Cameron Meierhoefer, VP of analytics at comScore, wrote.