14 DAY TRIAL // "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics," Mark Twain used to say and, unlike so many other things, the phrase is as true today as it was then. That being said, analytics firm Hitwise has released its numbers for the US search engine market in December and, yes, Google is still far ahead of its competition and growing, as previous numbers have confirmed. What's more, the analytics firm gives Google an even more optimistic lead than other reports, putting its market share at 72.25 percent a very, very slight bump from November.
"Google accounted for 72.25 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Jan. 2, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 14.83 percent, 8.92 percent and 2.54 percent, respectively. The remaining 66 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.48 percent of U.S. searches," Hitwise announced.
That's the gist of it, Google saw a small rise while all other major search engines dropped. Bing, Yahoo Search and Ask.com all went down 4 percent from 15.39 percent, 9.34 percent and 2.65 percent, respectively. It was only one month of decline for Bing after several of steady growth, so it's too early to tell if this is to become a trend. But it doesn't look good for Microsoft even with the prospect of the Yahoo Search deal.
However, Hitwise does has some good news for Bing, depending on how you look at it, as the search engine's success rate is going up. "At Experian Hitwise, we measure success rate as the percentage of executed searches that result in a visit to a site other than a main search domain," Hitwise's Bill Tancer explained. The firm found that Bing's success rate has been rising these past months, reaching 75 percent up from just 70 percent in October.
In this metric, Yahoo Search clearly leads with a 79 percent success rate while Google hovers at around the same rate as Bing. Tancer notes, though, that portal queries tend to be smaller and simpler, explaining Yahoo's lead, so it's not a clear indication of a search engine's result quality. Furthermore, seeing as Microsoft is trying to provide as much information within the results and keep users on the site, a growing 'success rate' may not be a good sign.