comScore released its October 2009 search share numbers and Google has passed 65% search market share, holding 65.4% share in October, up 0.5% from the previous month. comScore also claims that Microsoft Bing also gained 0.5% share, reaching 9.9%, while Yahoo dropped 0.8% to 18.0% from the previous month.

Nielsen also released its October 2009 stats, showing Google has a 66.1% share, Yahoo has a 15.4% and Microsoft Bing has a 9.7% share. I was unable to find Nielsen’s September report (did they publish one?) but I did find their August report which showed Bing had 10.7% share. In this case, Bing actually decreased in share by 1%, according to Nielsen.

As we always say, looking at these search share reports month-to-month is not always a good indication of the competitive landscape. I am sure Danny will be publishing a more comprehensive report, aggregating all this data, and fleshing out the true look at growth and decline amongst the various search engines.

While Bing is happily rolling out new search features, Microsoft can also smile at the latest search engine market share report from Experian Hitwise.

Google is still light years ahead of Yahoo, Bing, and Ask … but Experian Hitwise shows Bing with a 7% increase during October, while both Google and Yahoo saw small drops in search share.

Experian Hitwise also updates some stats related to search queries:

“Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, increased 3 percent between October and September 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 4 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries – those averaging one to four words long – decreased 1 percent from month to month.”

Postscript: Enquisite has published its own research on search engine referral data. It shows Google even further ahead of Yahoo, Bing, et al. But this chart tracks click thrus from each search engine, not the number of searches done.

We received some interesting data from search agency iCrossing yesterday. The data show US search market share percentages and distribution quite different than the major traffic metrics firms. The company says its numbers are “based on a large representative sample of Fortune 1000 companies, across all major verticals,” which use its search tracking tools.

Accordingly the iCrossing data show US September natural search market share to be the following:

• Google 76.7 percent
• Bing (increasingly slightly from Aug to) 8.2 percent
• Yahoo (decreasing to) 11.1 percent
• AOL and Ask show “precipitous declines”

This is how iCrossing characterized the data in an email to me: “it represents actual traffic received from engines, as picked up by our own analytics tracking across enterprise level sites, as opposed to all traffic on the Web.”

Compare comScore data for September:

Compare Hitwise:

The Bing numbers are relatively close in the data above but iCrossing shows Yahoo with a significantly smaller share than either comScore or Hitwise. And while those services both seem to show a stable core of usage for Ask and AOL search, iCrossing reflects losses for those engines.

Here are some visual representations of the iCrossing numbers:

Too much time is often spent about the new features the various major search engines roll out or the latest deals they cut. Here at Search Engine Land, we can be as guilty of that as anyone. To correct it, I’ll be spending more and more time highlighting poor quality search results that I encounter, in hopes of nudging the industry to improve things.

Canaries In The Search Mine

I’ve spoken and written for years that when it comes to search engines, I think there are two “canaries in the coal mine” that catch a whiff of something bad emanating from the search engines.

The first are librarians and research professionals. They’re acutely aware of when search counts don’t make sense, if something important in a field they know isn’t being listed and other issues.

The far larger group are site owners or search marketers. The common joke is that when they spot search engine spam, that stands for Someone Positioned Above Me. Thus, it’s easy to dismiss what they see as just being colored by self-interest.

Sure, there’s some of that. But these people are also often subject experts. As surely as Cypher in the Matrix could look at computer code and say, “All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead,” a subject expert like a site owner or search marketer can look at results and know when they don’t smell right, when something’s wrong.

About two weeks ago, our Reviewing Some Bad Google Search Results With Sergey Brin article highlighted a few bad results I could see in my subject area of expertise, that of search engines. Today, I’ll bring in another example, that of “search term research.”

Benchmarking Against Expert Knowledge

Search term research is one of the core aspects to search marketing, and I’ve covered various tools out there for years. Here at Search Engine Land, we maintain a Search Term Research page devoted to the topic. It’s a good page. There are probably better ones, and maintaining these types of pages is always difficult. Still, it’s kind of a benchmark for me. If I don’t see it ranking, what’s the quality of stuff that IS ranking above it?

As it turns out, our page isn’t on Google at all. Not at all. And it’s, um, our fault. The All In One SEO Pack plug-in we use with WordPress here set all of our category pages to be excluded from Google. It wasn’t that way originally. Back in the summer, the latest version of the plug-in changed things to overwrite how you’d previously configured it. I should have known better, too, because I even retweeted a warning about this. Everything’s fixed today, and we’ll see how things go.

Still, that page as well as my own knowledge of the area gives me a good benchmark I can use against other pages that do appear in the search results. So how’s it look?

Google: How About Some China Wholesale?

Over at Google, a search for search term research leads off with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which is an excellent first choice. It’s a dependable tool, offered for free, with great data. Some more tools follow that, then two older articles (from 2007 & 2006, respectively) on conference presentations about the topic. Those are kind of iffy to be in the top results given their age, but certainly they’re relevant. Then I get another tool, a fresher article that’s not super-substantial, a compilation list of articles and a nice conference presentation.

Overall, it’s not bad. Not fantastic, but not bad. Where things really fall down is when you go to the second page of results.

OK, few people go past the first page of results. I know this. But still, that second page of results? It contains what Google is presenting as among the very best out of 126 million pages on the web for this topic. The very best. And we get on the second page?

For those who can’t see the image above for some reason, the rundown:

• Link to a keyword research tool, which makes sense
• Really weird local results about local companies in New York that somehow seem related to search term research
• A really bad directory listing of resources
• An OK page listing some tools
• Agenda for a session on the topic for a conference in 2006
• A press release from someone speaking on the topic in 2006
• Another keyword research tool
• The most amazing bad result, some “China Wholesale Supplier” with search term research products. More on this in a bit…
• A review of one particular tool from 2006
• An article I wrote on the topic in 2007

I think the amazingly poor quality of these results are self-evident. Let’s look at that China Wholesale page. Again, out of 126 million possible matches, this is what Google thinks is the 18th best out of all of them for the topic of search term research:

I can’t even figure out what this is! One arrow points to how the page is in the “Search Term Research” category of the hosting web site. The other two point at what’s listed in this category, oil paintings of some soccer stars.

How on earth has Google, with its supposedly awesome attention to search quality, allowed this to show so high in the results?

But Bing’s Worse!

At least Google can fall back on the “others are worse” excuse. Let’s go to Bing:

Ugh. The rundown:

• Terms of service for those looking into broadband research?
• A tool, OK
• Wikipedia article on research in general. Not search term research — just research
• An undated article with bad advice that the best way to do research isn’t to do it at all. Just write! See what terms generate visits after you write. That’s terrible advice, because if you haven’t written using important terms, you’ll probably never see the traffic for them in the first place to know you should use them.
• That tool listed in number two? This is an article about it from the company that owns the tool
• Coverage of a search term research session at a conference from 2007
• A compilation of articles on the topic
• A page for marketing terms. Not search term research, just marketing terms
• Another page with coverage of a search term research conference session in 2007
• A press release about a biospace research project.

Did I say ugh? I’ll say it again. Ugh. It’s self evident how many of these pages are clearly NOT the best on the topic out of the millions of pages that Bing could pick.

For some reason, I see completely different results than this when I use Safari, rather than Firefox:

These are generally better, but I still get weird outliers like one for a Utah History center or a place to buy essays.

Yahoo: 50% Irrelevant

How about Yahoo? Ugh again:

Pages for biotech research, autism research, research at Oregon Health & Science University plus two for Lexis/Nexis show up. That’s 50% of the top results completely off target for what I searched for. Not just 50% so-so results. They’re just totally not right. At all.

Ask’s OK, If You Can Stand The Ads

Ironically, given I’ve written it off as a serious search engine last year, Ask seems to have fairly decent results for the topic. There’s a bad press release of someone speaking on the topic, but everything else is good or at least related to the subject.

Of course, you have a giant ad unit containing five paid listings that’s shoved between the first result and the rest. Then another five at the bottom. Then one more paid listing after that, with no disclaimer as required by the Federal Trade Commission.

Things Feel Worse, But Hard To Quantify

Sadly, we still have no commonly accepted measurements of relevancy across search engines, and it’s an area that gets harder and harder to assess, as more material is blended in alongside web page results. That’s something I’d still like the search engine to collaborate on, some independent regular assessment of their quality.

To me, it feels like they’re getting worse, not better. But I can’t document that. What I can do is demonstrate without much difficulty, for areas where I have subject expertise, how bad they can be. They get by because along with the bad, there’s enough good. But they should be better than this.

Already widely reported from yesterday the Pew Internet & American Life almost 20 percent of US Internet users are on Twitter or updating their status with another social network: LinkedIn, MySpace or Facebook. According to the report:

Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users – those under age 44.

Here’s Pew’s demographic breakdown:

According to the report, parsing by network:

The median age of a Twitter user is 31, which has remained stable over the past year. The median age for MySpace is now 26, down from 27 in May 2008, and the median age for LinkedIn is now 39, down from 40. Facebook, however, is graying a bit: the median age for this social network site is now 33, up from 26 in May 2008.

The Pew report paints a slightly different and younger picture of Twitter users than earlier studies:

Source: comScore, February, 2009 (via MarketingCharts)

Here’s the breakdown of social networking more generally compared with Twitter usage:

The report also found that mobile users and those who have more devices are more likely to use Twitter or a comparable service for status updates.

These data illustrate the growing importance of integrating social media into search marketing strategies.

According to the latest comScore survey, Google’s search market share climbed to just under 65% last month, and remains more than triple that of Yahoo, the second-place search engine.

ComScore pegs Google with 64.9% of all searches conducted during September 2009, up from 64.6% in August. Yahoo dropped from August’s 19.3% to 18.8% in September. And Bing, in third place, showed minor growth from 9.3% to 9.4%.

Despite Google’s small gains in market share, comScore says Google saw a slight drop in the number of searches — but that could be due to September having one less day than August.

A new and wide ranging report from the UK regulatory agency Ofcom about media literacy finds that 32 percent of UK kids aged 12-15 years old believe that the links/listings shown at the top of search results are the most “truthful.” Here’s how the report summarized this finding:

Among children aged 12-15 who use the internet, almost all have experience of using search engine websites (94%).

Those who use search engine sites were shown a list of options and were asked to say which, if any, apply in terms of the way results are shown on search engine sites.

There is no clear consensus among search engine users, but 12-15s are more likely to respond that results are ranked on their usefulness or relevance (37%) or their truthfulness (32%) than they are to respond that websites pay money to be at the top of the list (14%).

The question prompting the responses charted above was “Which if any of these explain the way results are shown when you use search engine websites like Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask Jeeves?”

From 2008 to 2009 the number of those who think that top search results are based on “relevance” declined in favor of “truthfulness.” It doesn’t appear there was much detailed questioning around sponsored vs. organic results and definitions or explanations of each category. Consequently it’s not clear to me if the kids are referring to paid results in their statements about relevance or truthfulness.

Google accounted for more than 71% of US searches in September, according to the latest Hitwise survey.

While Google’s market share continues to rise slowly, both Yahoo and Bing lost ground in September — down 3% and 5%, respectively.

The US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) issued warning letters issued in late March, 2009 to a number of big pharmaceutical companies, saying that their search ads were misleading and didn’t contain the required disclosure information mandated by US federal regulations. As one might have expected this caused the companies to temporarily pull their SEM campaigns and resulted in a “59% drop in sponsored link exposures,” according to comScore:

An analysis of exposure to branded URLs within comScore’s data revealed that substantial declines occurred immediately following the letters being sent on March 26. Sponsored link exposures dropped 59 percent from 10.5 million during the week ending March 29 to 4.3 million during the week ending April 5. Declines in sponsored link exposures not only occurred in the weeks immediately following the letters, but continued over the next several months, plummeting 84 percent overall from March to June.

This basically means that they suspended their search ads while they tried to figure out how to comply with the FDA’s rules. Annually the pharmaceutical industry represents almost a billion dollars in online ad spending in the US. Here are the IAB’s numbers for 2008:

ComScore also said that organic sites promoting pharma products were also re-evaluated by the companies and experienced a traffic decline for a period of time:

Vanity and unbranded link exposures also experienced a decline, on average, across brands during the same period, although these methods were not under scrutiny in the FDA letters. Unbranded sites, which give additional information on the condition and treatment but do not directly promote the brand drug, declined 35-percent March to June to slightly more than one million exposures. Vanity URLs, which make no mention of a specific brand while generically describing a health condition but then redirect to the brand or drug’s website, declined 11 percent in June to 3.2 million average exposures versus March.

One of the challenges for the pharma industry in doing SEM for specific drugs is writing ad copy that is legally compliant, with a very limited amount of space in which to operate. It’s kind of absurd in a way. It thus may be that the industry will have to target conditions or ailments in paid-search ads and not mention specific drugs at all.

Since it’s launch Bing has steadily been inching up in market share, conveying the impression that Google has a bona fide competitor on its hands. Yesterday, however, data from NetApplications and StatCounter reflect that Bing may have seen its first usage declines since the engine’s launch several months ago.

Before getting too excited one way or another, we must be cautious. There are monthly upticks and downturns. Before drawing any broader conclusions we’d need to see this confirmed by comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Compete — in other words, a consensus view — and then we’d need to look at the trend over a period of time.

Source: StatCounter

There are more feature enhancements and releases in the pipeline for Bing. And I know that Microsoft believes it’s only just begun with the search engine. There’s also the Yahoo deal, which still must be approved but which more than double’s Bing’s advertiser’s reach. And there’s also mobile, which is heating up.

But if it turned out that Bing’s growth had in fact stalled it would be a kind of “what now?” moment for Microsoft.