14 DAY TRIAL // The first batch of search market share numbers for the previous month was confusing enough due to the automated searches on both Yahoo and Bing. Now, stats from Experian Hitwise only make the picture murkier, as they show a completely opposite trend. According to the analytics company, Google gained market share in May, at the expense of both Yahoo and Bing.
“Google accounted for 72.17 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending May 29, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask received 14.43 percent, 9.23 percent and 2.14 percent, respectively. The remaining 74 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 2.03 percent of U.S. searches,” Hitwise announced.
Google added 0.77 percent points to its market share, a one-percent growth, a small increase that doesn’t necessarily indicate a larger trend. Yahoo lost almost half of a percent point, a three-percent drop in market share, while Bing only lost two percent of its slice of the search market.
On the face of it, Google is the big winner, but the numbers are just too small to make a clear assessment. However, the fact that neither Yahoo nor Bing is growing may not bode well for the two search engines.
In the wider picture, people are questioning the accuracy of this type of statistics. It’s not that the analytics companies are doing something wrong, it’s just that the methodology may not be reflective of the actual market share anymore.
One of the issues under scrutiny is automated search that all search engines rely on, to a degree. The problem is bigger with Yahoo and Microsoft, as both companies have added searches to their properties, notably the photo slideshow features. These searches are conducted automatically with no user interaction, but are counted as actual searches. comScore says it already plans to rectify this and it’s unclear how the issue affects other analytics companies.