Danny wrote about the latest comScore search share numbers and what they might mean. Have Yahoo and Bing genuinely gained share or has it been gamed or rigged with tricks? Has Google lost share? Danny argued that Google’s share might have slipped slightly but that overall query volume had risen so the share numbers don’t tell the whole story.
Ad network Chitika took a look at the question from the perspective of its network and came to the conclusion that the Yahoo and Bing share gains are not just the result of tricks or slide-show manipulation:
[W]e thought we’d take a look at our own data from April through the 13th of July, to see whether or not it appeared the slideshow trick really skewed the data.As it turns out, comScore appears to be right about actual market share changes. Between April and July, Yahoo! has picked up one percent of the market, Bing has picked up over two percent, and Google has seen a corresponding decline in traffic generated.
Here are the share numbers from Chitika’s network, which skew heavily in favor of Google:
| Yahoo! | Bing | AOL | Ask | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| April | 88.9% | 4.9% | 4.4% | 0.8% | 1% |
| May | 88.5% | 5.2% | 4.7% | 0.8% | 0.9% |
| June | 86.8% | 5.3% | 6.1% | 0.9% | 1% |
| July (MTD) | 85.8% | 5.9% | 6.6% | 0.8% | 0.9% |
These figures generally confirm what comScore appears to be showing: Yahoo and Bing gains are real but Google, for the foreseeable future at least, has nothing to fear.
Related Topics: Stats: comScore | Stats: General | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Size
I can see that the numbers are higher so they are gaining share, but from what I have noticed they are not gaining all of this share by more users going to their site and entering a query. They are gaining these searches by putting a link that looks like it goes to a story that may be circulating in the media or just look interesting and then sending the user to a bing search. It has gotten me a few times in the past few weeks.
I’m not necessarily saying there is anything wrong with this strategy, it is very creative and obviously effective so congrats but there is just an undertone of icky behind tricking people into searching with your engine. It just seems like an easy way to tweek the numbers but who knows, maybe from this “accidental search” some people are turning into bing users…