14 DAY TRIAL // The latest comScore search market numbers have been released and, while the numbers themselves are anything but exciting, Yahoo is feeling cheated out because of Google Instant so the analytics company felt it needed to explain how it deals with the new Google.
"Looking at comScore’s report, it appears to me that a majority of Google’s query growth in September (a month in which Google Instant was live for 20 days) came from precisely these kinds of interactions. I bet even the folks at Google are mystified by this kind of accounting," Shashi Seth, Sr. VP of Yahoo! Search & Marketplaces, writes.
His biggest worry is that counting searches even if they are not completed, i.e. the user hits "Enter," is misleading and makes the data less relevant to the ones relying on it.
However, comScore has clarified the way it counts Instant searches. Note that comScore's post went up before Yahoo's and it's unlikely that the web company wasn't fully aware of the way comScore counts searches.
Any search in which the user hits "Enter" or clicks on "Search," clicks on any of the search results, clicks on any of the ads, clicks on any of the filters, for example limiting the time frame, or one of the verticals, News, Blogs, etc., is counted as part of the Explicit Core Search.
The Explicit Core Search numbers only count searches in which the user had a direct input, which characterizes all of the above situations.
Furthermore, if a user pauses when typing for more than three seconds, long enough for search results to be displayed, comScore counts this as part of the Total Core Search numbers.
According to Yahoo, if people just type slow, less than one key every three seconds, each of those steps would be counted as a search. Even assuming that a lot of people can't type any faster than that, these searches would not count as explicit searches.
While Google saw a 2.4 percent points increase in market share in the Total Core Search, it also saw a 0.7 percent points rise in Explicit Core Search.
If anything, with users getting results before they finished typing, the explicit searches should have gone down with Google Instant.
What's more, the reason why Explicit Core Search was created in the first place is that Yahoo started doing automated searches in various places on its online properties like Yahoo News.
These searches, while not initiated by users, in many cases the users didn't even realize that a search was conducted, led to an artificial increase in Yahoo's search market share.
Somehow, Yahoo didn't feel it necessary to clarify the situation and warn that "third party measurement companies are potentially misleading the consumers of their data" when it introduced those searches.
While Yahoo is right to worry about the changing search landscape and paradigm, it does look like comScore is doing its best to keep up and present a fair assessment of the search market and it's doing it in a fairly transparent way.