As part of my Compete: Google Keeps Stomping The Others In Search Traffic article earlier this week, I posted the exact rules that Compete uses to calculate search share, along with commentary on why digging into this is becoming increasingly important. A reader noted the rules didn’t seem right. As a result, Compete stepped up and recalculated things — causing Yahoo’s search search and volume for May 2008 to rise significantly (from 13.3% to 18.6%). Perhaps good news to late for those departing executives (and see here and here).

I’ve got nothing but kudos for Compete sharing this level of detail, and it’s something I’m in the process of trying to get from the other ratings services as well. We depend so much on these figures to gauge the market "health" of various services, but how exactly they are compiled gets relatively little attention. I’m keeping at that as part of my ongoing project. In the meantime, please see the original post for updated figures (at the bottom in the postscript), plus a look at why digging into the stats is so important.

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: Compete | Stats: Popularity

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is a Founding Editor of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also serves as Chief Content Officer for Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He has a personal blog called Daggle (and keeps his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan

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