comScore: Slight Google Rise, Status Quo With Rest In February 2007

Mar 23, 2007 at 2:59pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Now having covered the latest search popularity figures from Hitwise and Nielsen//NetRatings, it’s time to look at those out from comScore. It’s mostly the same old news — Google up a bit, everyone else holding steady.

Here are the figures, which cover the percentage of home, work and university searches done in the US for February 2007:

Google: 48.1%
Yahoo: 28.1%
Microsoft Live: 10.5%
Ask: 5.0%
AOL: 4.9%

Here’s a look over the past year:

As you can see, Google continues to have incremental rises. The rest all remain relatively steady — including Microsoft’s Live.com, which after months of drops has finally flattened out for the past three months.

Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief 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 oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, maintains a personal blog called Daggle and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

See more articles by Danny Sullivan >

Share, Bookmark & Discuss This Article
More:

See more stories like this in the Members Library! Check out the Stats: Popularity, Stats: comScore sections of the Members Library where this story is filed. Members also get access to exclusive video content, a members-only weekly & monthly newsletter, plus more. Check out all the benefits!

2 COMMENTS ON comScore: Slight Google Rise, Status Quo With Rest In February 2007

Michael Martinez, March 23rd, 2007 at 5:25 pm ET:

Your chart doesn’t reflect what the data actually tells us. If overall number of queries has grown, then the fact that Google’s share has increased only slightly is less significant than the fact that thtee other services did not lose share.

In other words, their overall query traffic must have increased too. For example, if Microsoft took 10.6% of 6.831 billion queries (that is, 724,086,000 queries for Microsoft in Janaury) then 10.5% of 6.9 billion queries indicates they served 724,500,000 queries in February.

We don’t have to quibble over statistical significance and semantics. My point is that people are using all but one of the major search services more than before.

Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL are therefore growing their query traffic (this metric, however, is not very useful for measuring market share despite the fact it is preferred).

Ask appears to have actually lost query traffic.

These properties should be measuring their markets in terms of unique visitors, repeat visitors, and unique visits — all with respect to number of queries per visit and visitor. They need to look at how long people use their query services and why those people stop using their query services.

And while I don’t expect to see the data any time soon, it would helpful if we could see breakdowns of the data by types of search: Web, Blog, News, Image, and Local (I realize there are other verticals but these are the most important in my opinion).

NOTE: And if I were IAC, I’d be co-branding Ask Search into every property they operate. Their failure to do so — even to cobrand Ask search into AskCity — should go down as one of the greatest marketing blunders in Web history.

Danny Sullivan, March 24th, 2007 at 1:11 pm ET:

> In other words, their overall query traffic must have increased too.

No, that’s not always the case. In some months, share drops even though queries have gone up. In other months, it’s the opposite. I might do a future look at number of queries versus shares in more depth. It is important to understand if query volume has actually risen even if share has dropped. That’s why I started exploring that issue in this post.

There are, of course, many other ways you can measure traffic and value aside from these metrics. I’ll try to get into those more in the future, as well. But share remains a good starting point, and my focus with share remains trying to put the figures in perspective by showing trends and comparing those trends across multiple rating services.

FREE DAILY SEARCH NEWS RECAP!