According to Compete’s research, Google-powered search (which includes both Google and AOL) had 68.3% of the US market in August, down from 69% in July. Bing-powered search — Bing and Yahoo combined — held 31.7% of the market in August, up from 31% in July.

Compete’s chart also shows continued rises in search activity, with overall query volume up 17.6% over the past 12 months.

Compete’s market share stats mirror what comScore and Experian Hitwise have been reporting in recent months. See the related articles below for more background.

According to Compete, both Google and Yahoo very modestly lost share, AOL and Ask were flat while Bing gained:

• All engines except Bing experienced a decline in unique visitors in February, with Bing seeing a 7.6% increase in UVs MOM
• Bing Powered engines (Yahoo! and Bing) continued to increase its share of market to 30.8%

Bing continues to show incremental traction.

The big difference between the Hitwise, comScore and Compete data is that Compete shows Bing now ahead of Yahoo, while comScore and Hitwise show Yahoo leading Bing. Hitwise, however, shows Bing and Yahoo much closer together than comScore, which still has Yahoo ahead by a little under three points.

All the usual caveats apply to taking one month’s data and inferring or extrapolating too much from it.

• Google — 66.6 percent (record high for Google in comScore’s numbers)
• Yahoo — 16 percent (down from 16.4 percent in Nov)
• Bing — 12.0 (up from 11.8 percent in November)
• Ask — 3.5 percent (down slightly)
• AOL — 1.9 percent (an historic low)

None of these figures include mobile query volumes, which will become material over time. The combined Bing-Yahoo share was 28 percent, basically flat vs. November. Below is the November comScore chart:

Yesterday Hitwise reported its search market share numbers, showing Bing with a 5 percent gain in December.

Postscript: comScore has now released its numbers officially.

Caveats To Live & Love

I’ve been covering search share figures for a long time. A very long time — from before Google existed. Before I dive into a post about search share, I’m going to revisit my long-standing advice that I offer anyone:

• Avoid drawing conclusions based on month-to-month comparisons. Lots of things can cause one month’s figures to be incomparable to another month. It’s better to see the trend across multiple months in a row.
• Avoid drawing conclusions based on one ratings service’s figures. Each service has a unique methodology used to create popularity estimates. This means that ratings will rarely be the same between services. However, a trend that you see reflected across two or more services may give you faith in trusting that trend.
• Consider Actual Number Of Searches: While share for a particular search engine might drop, the raw number of searches might still be going up (and thus they might be earning more money, despite a share drop). This is because the “pie” of searches keeps growing, so even a smaller slice of the pie might be more than a bigger slice in the past.

Do Two Months Of Gains = Trend?

As I’ve warned, a month-to-month jump is no big deal. A two month rise? I’m more interested. Keep that going over six months, now I’m feeling like a trend is happening.

There’s interest today in Yahoo because new figures from comScore show that in March and April of this year, Yahoo increased its search share. Prior to that, Yahoo had a full year of share decline.

April is particularly interesting, because Yahoo rose almost a full point, from a 16.9% share to a 17.7% share. And boom! In both March and April, Google saw a drop in share. Take that, big G!

What happened? comScore puts the growth down to navigational changes:

Both Yahoo! Sites and Microsoft Sites have experienced gains due in part to the introduction of new site navigation experiences that tie content and related search results together within several channels.

Search Share Over Time

Do these changes go to the bottom line? Hold on to that thought. First, let’s look at the share trend over time:

That chart shows the percentage of searches handled each month by Google, Yahoo and Bing out of all searches that happen on five “core” search engines that comScore measures in the United States (Ask and AOL are the other two, not shown on the chart — both have less than 5% share).

Yahoo Slips From Its Share “Band”

That’s a pretty stark drop for Yahoo. In the past, I’ve written about search engines being within “bands” of share. Yahoo had been barely holding within the 20% to 30% “band,” then last September settled into the 10% to 20% range.

And Google? Sure, the last two months saw its share drop about 1% in total, a tiny bit compared to its overall share. But more important, Google has been in the 60% to 70% band for over two years. It’s way early to be thinking something’s significantly wrong. Google’s had consecutive drops before and kept on growing despite these. That’s not been the long-term story for Yahoo.

Is Bing Robbing Yahoo?

Meanwhile, look at Bing. Unlike Yahoo, it shows signs of leaving its traditional band of 0% to 10% behind and moving into the 10% to 20% range. Indeed, virtually all of Bing’s share increase appears to have come from Yahoo.

That’s not a surprise. Bing has been spending like mad on television advertising, positioning itself as a Google alternative. That seems to be working — except instead of pulling people from Google, Bing seems to be pulling the Google alternative audience that had been using Yahoo, as I expected.

Maybe. You’d really need to do a much deeper analysis of the figures, in particular, to get some crossover figures. What chunk of people used Google as their “primary” search engine and Yahoo as their “secondary” one before Bing’s launch in June 2009 compared to today, for example. That might give you a better sense if Bing really is pulling people away from Yahoo, as the figures suggest.

Getting those figures is hard work. It’s custom data that the big ratings services don’t typically release, nor that the financial analysts — if they’re ordering it up — typically put out in their financial advisory notes.

The Importance Of Search Volume

Still, there’s another number that’s easy to get that provides some great perspective — search volume. This is the number of searches that happen on a particular search engine in each month.

Why’s search volume so important? Well, the overall “pie” of searches keeps getting larger. A smaller percentage or slice of a big pie can equal more searches than a big slice of a small pie.

For instance, look at this recent share drop for Google:

• February 2010: 65.5% share
• March 2010: 65.1% share
• Drop: 0.4%

A drop, right? A sign that the big G is having problems. But now look at the volume:

• February 2010: 9.5 billion searches
• March 2010: 10 billion searches
• Gain: 0.5 billion searches

Google’s “Loss” Is Actually Huge Gain

Got that? Google gained 0.5 billion searches in the same time period that it was reported as having a marketshare drop. 500 million searches. That’s nearly as many searches as Ask handles in a given month. More than AOL handles. It’s 1/4 of ALL searches that Bing handles, or about 20% of ALL searches that Yahoo handles. Oh — and that’s even with me rounding down to keep everything in even multiples of 5. The actual volume change was 573 million searches.

How did this happen? Well, the overall searches on the five major core search engines reported by comScore totaled like this:

• February 2010: 14.5 billion searches
• March 2010: 15.5 billion searches

In one month, 1 billion “new” searches came out from nowhere. More than half of those new searches — about 600 million of them, came from Google. Yahoo only added about 200 million new searches to the pie; Bing, about 150 million, figures all rounded.

The pie grew overall, with Google by far the biggest contributor to that growth, but ironically its competitors are so much smaller that their growth made Google seem to have “lost” when talking about share figures.

Comparing Share To Volume

So what’s the volume trend like? First, a reminder of the share figures:

Now the volume figures:

Anyone want to get excited about Yahoo’s 1% “share” growth in a given month now? Sure, Yahoo’s also grown volume in the last two months — but on a volume basis, Yahoo’s even further behind Google than the share figures reflect.

Google Has Nearly Doubled Volume

Over the past two years, Google’s nearly doubled its search volume from around 6 billion searches per month to 10 billion searches — and that’s not counting searches at Google-owned YouTube. In the same period, Yahoo’s pretty much still at the 2.5 billion searches range — no long term growth. At least Bing has shown steady growth from the 1 billion to 2 billion range that seems likely to continue — assuming Bing keeps doing the marketing.

If Bing stops marketing, we’ll see. That’s the real thing to watch right now. What happens when the TV ads stop?

Gaming Search Figures?

As for the gaming aspect, let’s go back to what else comScore had to say on those navigational queries:

These features provide search results to users as they navigate through topical content and meet comScore’s established criteria for counting search queries.

That’s code for “we might be counting things we didn’t count before, and in case anyone complains [ahem, Google], these are legit searches.”

Of course, if new things are being counted, then all the past figures usually get tossed out — that’s what Nielsen did with its measurements in the fall of last year. I’ll be revisiting this in a future post.

We’ve been here before. In particular, there’s been a long-standing issue on whether the game-oriented searches that Bing offers (such as at Club Bing) should be counted as “real” searches (see SearchPerks – Microsoft’s New Prizes For Searches Program).

It’s actually part of something I’ve been working on recently, and here’s a quote I got from comScore last month on the issue as part of my research:

So did the Yahoo and Bing navigational changes really grow search that much and if so, do they go to the real bottom line, as there’s much commentary on today? I’ll follow up more on that later when I’ve had a chance to talk further with Yahoo and comScore. But as Kara Swisher at AllThingsD notes, we’ll really know (to some degree) with actual financial reports come out.

Also keep in mind that it’s not just changes at Yahoo and Bing that can inflate search figures. Every time Google runs a custom logo for some holiday, people click on it — and generate a search. In the past two years, Google’s greatly increased the number of logos it has run (see my Those Special Google Logos, Sliced & Diced, Over The Years post from this weekend for more). Are those generating volume increases?

Easy To Jump; Harder To Keep Flying

Here’s the thing. From what I’ve seen over the years, new navigation or other changes may grow share and/or volume to a new level but they don’t produce continued growth. In other words, you might jump up to a new height, but then you stop flying higher unless there’s actual honest-to-goodness search growth that’s also happening.

If Yahoo’s volume continues to rise according to multiple ratings services over the long term — and search-related revenues rise with it — then there’s a compelling story. So far, it still feels like the same old, same old to me — Yahoo losing people probably to Bing; Google standing well above them both with no signs of erosion.

Today’s news also highlight a long-standing issue that the industry has yet to address. Search share and search volume figures don’t tell the entire story. Both can be “inflated.” Or deflated, in a world where “blended” search might integrate information that previously required two searches to retrieve.

Revenue per search helps, but when Google doesn’t break out search revenue from display and contextual ad revenue, how much they make per search is an inaccurate guessing game that some third parties like to play. And even revenue per search might not indicate a long-term consumer trend. You can spike revenue per search by simply adding the number of ads to a page — but in turn, that might be a turnoff to searchers, leading to a long-term audience loss.

Ideally, we’d have some industry-agreed benchmarks. Don’t get your hopes up about that, however.

1. Yahoo News
2. Google News
3. New York Times sites
4. CNN
5. China’s QQ.com
6. BBC
7. MSN

In the US Yahoo still ranks as number one but Google News reportedly falls down the list below the traditional news domains, such as NY Times and CNN. However, over at Nielsen (via Editor & Publisher) the numbers appear to be quite different than the comScore data above — especially the ranking of Google News.

Here’s Nielsen’s list of the top global online news sites for November, 2009:

1. Yahoo! News
2. CNN Digital Network
3. MSNBC Digital Network
4. AOL News
5. NYTimes.com
6. Tribune Newspapers
7. Google News
8. Fox News Digital Network
9. ABCNEWS Digital Network
10. Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division
11. Washingtonpost.com
12. CBS News Digital Network
13. McClatchy Newspaper Network
14. Advance Internet
15. TheHuffingtonPost.com
16. USATODAY.com
17. MediaNews Group Newspapers
18. Hearst Newspapers Digital
19. BBC
20. Daily News (NY) Online Edition

Meanwhile here are Compete data showing, in the US, yet another slightly different ranking:

Below is how a US-only list of top news sites looked in 2004 (per Nielsen). Impressively the top four sites are the same then and now:

1. Yahoo News
2. CNN
3. MSNBC
4. AOL News
5. Gannett
6. IBS
7. Knight Ridder Digital
8. NY Times
9. Tribune Newspapers
10. USA Today

Separately Hitwise reports an interesting trend in Australia, which is probably consistent with user behavior in other markets: people spending more time with fewer sites. According to Hitwise:

We’re also seeing a greater concentration in visits to the top 10 websites . . . The top 10 websites accounted for 29% share of visits in November 2009, compared to 26.3% share of visits in November 2008. In other words, the ‘big’ players are getting bigger.

Despite the Internet being a vast universe of content activity is more and more concentrated at the top. How is this explained?

Is this a function of increasing visibility and activity around a small number of top sites? Is this a greater share of resources  concentrated among the big players? Is this culture? Certainly in the context of Google and news, it can refer traffic to its own site via search.

The trend is the same with ads: the top sites and networks capture the lion’s share of ad dollars according to the IAB.

Some have argued that news brands are fading (diluted by the way in which search “flattens” all news sources); however these lists above paint a somewhat different picture. There are a number of “aggregators” that people visit for convenience and breadth. Those include Yahoo, AOL, Google and, now, the HuffingtonPost. Otherwise these lists are dominated by traditional news media.

It would seem to me that brands do continue to matter very much in news; distribution in an online world dominated by search is their obvious challenge. But mobile publishing and distribution opens up new oppportunities for these traditional media sources. And they’re very aware of that, empahsizing smartphones (esp. the iPhone) and the emerging tablet/eReader universe.

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.

In the “expanded view” of search, what stands out are the following:

• Search volume declines at eBay, AOL and MySpace
• Growth at Bing/Microsoft and dramatic growth at Facebook (20 percent vs. July)

All the typical qualifications and caveats apply, but it appears that Bing does have positive momentum. (I recall my 69 year old mother without my prompting extolling the virtues of Bing vs. Google to me a couple of months ago.)

Fear not, Danny will do his customary roundup of all the numbers at a later time.

• Google: .97 percent
• Yahoo: 1.24 percent
• Bing: 1.5 percent

Bing appears has made some incremental gains in search market share since its launch at the end of May. The two most recent roundups of the numbers are here and here. Even though Bing has been well received and has some momentum it doesn’t appear that will quickly translate into significant market share advances. For that reason Microsoft still needs Yahoo’s reach.

Turning to the seemingly perpetual subject of a search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, AdAge is reporting that a deal, previously described as “imminent,” could be announced this week. The article says the payment structure was a sticking point and will be a revenue share rather than an upfront payment and revenue guarantees, which Yahoo had reportedly wanted:

Execs in Redmond never conceived of the deal as an upfront purchase of Yahoo’s search traffic but as a deal in which Yahoo would be compensated from a share of revenue from the sale of search ads. Yahoo would be allowed to sell search ads on Bing.com as well as its own site, giving it more search inventory to sell and making it a bigger player in the search sales front. It would also immediately be able to save millions by not having to maintain its own search infrastructure.

The latest terms of the deal underscore Microsoft’s devotion to developing and owning technology vs. selling media. The deal won’t make it a bigger seller of online advertising but it would allow it to eliminate a search-technology competitor in Yahoo and consolidate roughly 30% of the search marketplace on its own platform — a large enough share, CEO Steve Ballmer seems to believe, to dent Google’s dominance.

If the article is correct then Yahoo would retain the ability to sell search and display to its advertisers, but probably not through an integrated platform. Currently Yahoo sells search via Panama and display advertising through APT; however there was always discussion of integrating the platforms in the near term.

We’ll have to wait to see whether there’s a deal and what the terms are. Any such deal would have to pass muster with regulators before it could be implemented.

On that front, the NY Times ran an article this weekend describing internal conflict within the Obama administration about how aggressive to get with anti-trust policy and prosecutions. The US Department of Justice anti-trust chief Christine Varney, who has described Google previously as “a monopoly,” is apparently facing push-back in her quest to reign in some US corporations. How this internal debate plays out will affect scrutiny of potential deals such as Yahoo-Microsoft.

The comScore figures have gone out to the financial analyst community, and the comScore press release with them usually arrives a week after that. But Mark Mahaney at Citigroup gave permission to cite figures in his report, which includes analysis for investors (too early to call, Bing has a “solid product” but faces “large uphill battle”).

For June 2009, here’s the search share handled by each of the major players in the United States:

• Google: 65.0%, unchanged from May 2009
• Yahoo: 19.6%, down from 20.1%, a 0.5% drop
• Bing: 8.4%, up from 8.0%, a 0.4% rise
• Ask: 3.9%, unchanged from May 2009
• AOL: 3.1%, unchanged from May 209

In terms of search volume, actual number of searches handled:

• Google: 9.135 billion, down from 9.307 billion, a 172 million search drop
• Yahoo: 2.755 billion, down from 2.877 billion, a 122 million search drop
• Bing: 1.179 billion, up from 1.149 billion, a 30 million rise
• Ask: 552 million, down from 555 million, a 3 million drop
• AOL: 439 million, down form 438 million, a 1 million drop

The volume figures are important. With Bing showing a 0.4% rise in share, while Yahoo shows a 0.5% drop, it’s easy to assume that Bing “stole” share from Yahoo. However, what happens each month is that the overall “pie” of searches gets larger or smaller in general. In the summer, the pie often shrinks as people are out of school and not searching as much.

So Yahoo’s drop? The 122 million searches that it lost didn’t all flow into Bing, which shows a 30 million rise. Of course, normally you’d also have expected Bing to also have shown a summer drop. That’s also important to consider, in fully measuring the gain. For example, if it had normally fallen by 50 million searches, then to show a 30 million rise would mean in reality an 80 million overall gain.

Aren’t interpreting stats fun? Suffice to say, Bing did well to be up, but it’s uncertain who they pulled away from (especially since the Bing marketing and publicity might have generated “new” searches that wouldn’t normally have existed), and we remain very much in watch and see mode.

For those keeping score at home, here’s how it looks with the other rating services, on a share and gain basis, with June 2009 cited first, then May 2009 and the change:

• comScore: 8.4%, up from 8.0%, a 0.4% rise
• Compete: 6.2%, up from 6.5%, a tiny 0.3% gain
• Hitwise: 5.25%, down from 5.64, a .039% drop

On a weekly basis, Hitwise found a rise from the beginning of the month in June to the end of the month. More on that in the related stories below:

• Bing: comScore sees Gains; Compete Sees Same Old, Same Old (early June 2009 figures)
• Hitwise: Bing Both Grows & Drops In June; Google Still Tops (full June 2009 figures)
• At One Month, Bing Says Unique Users Up; Compete Says Barely Any Gain In Searches (full June 2009 figures)
• Report: Search Ad Spending Stabilizes While Bing Gains On Google, Yahoo
• Report: Google Has Nothing To Fear From Bing Itself (interesting consumer behavior survey from JP Morgan)

For those who want an early peak into July, here’s the past five days of share data from Compete:

Bing figures don’t include searches at Club Bing, which add about another 1.5% or so share, roughly. Bing started June in the 5.5% to 6.0% range, so it’s picked up about 1% share according to Compete, since June.

As I keep saying, while there’s a temptation to draw conclusions from the early figures, we really want to see what happens around October and November. People will be back from school then, the months will be more “regular” in nature and the Bing marketing campaign will likely have ended or ramped down. Will word-of-mouth have spread by then? Will behaviors have changed?

Here are the figures showing share of searches each search engine handled in the United States, for June 2009 from Compete:

Normally, I’m loathe to do month-to-month comparisons, because they can be so easily skewed by many factors and not be indicative of a trend. But given Bing’s massive launch, it makes sense to look closely at the May to June 2009 change.

Bing was up — barely — from 6.2% to 6.5%, a tiny 0.3% gain. Did that hurt Google? Nope. Google rose from 73.3% to 73.9%, a 0.6% gain. Down were Yahoo and Ask, both losing 0.4% in share. AOL was unchanged (and barely registers at 0.8%).

So Bing hurt Yahoo and Ask? Hard to say. There’s often a seasonal downturn in summer, when students are out of school, so searching declines.

In terms of search volume — the actual number of searches performed — EVERYONE but Bing was down. That suggests the new marketing helped drive additional queries rather than necessarily pulled from the other players.

Google dropped from 9.145 billion searches in May to 9.065 billion searches in June, an 80 million searches drop. Yahoo lost about the same, 83 million searches. Ask lost 55 million and AOL lost 5 million. That’s 223 million searches lost. Did Bing get them all? No. Bing was up only 1 million searches.

What happened is the overall search “pie” of searches got smaller. Bing’s marketing helped it keep a larger slice of pie than likely would have happened, but the decline of the others isn’t because it “stole” from them.

And how’s Google up on a percentage basis when it’s also lost 80 million searches? That’s because on a percentage basis, Google actually got a bigger slice of the smaller pie compared to May 2009.

If searches from Bing’s “Club Bing” gaming service are included, the service does much better, gaining nearly 1% in share (0.9%). But Google also gains even more share, 1.4%. That’s because in May 2009, when Club Bing (then Club Live) figures were counted, that gave it less of a slice compared to June:

In terms of ads, Bing has more to trumpet. The percentage of “sponsored referrals,” that is the percentage of people clicking on ads compared to free results, nearly doubled from 3.1% in May to 5.6% in June, a 2.5% gain:

That comes along with news from Efficient Frontier’s research that Bing has gained click share along with advertiser spend share (see Report: Search Ad Spending Stabilizes While Bing Gains On Google, Yahoo).

Of course, both Ask and AOL saw similar gains. Ask gained 2.2% month-to-month in sponsored clicks and AOL got a 1.9% gain. Neither had major redesigns or marketing pushes.

Where’s this leave us? Hitwise: Bing Both Grows & Drops In June; Google Still Tops covers how stats last week from Hitwise were hardly conclusive. On a monthly basis, Bing lost share. On a week-by-week basis, it gained over 2% from the beginning of the month to the end.

So, it remains watch-and-see. NetRatings and comScore will be out later this month with their own figures for June. Still, we really want to see what happens around October and November, when people are back from school and the marketing barrage has ended or ramped down. How has the service done then? Bing: comScore sees Gains; Compete Sees Same Old, Same Old has more perspective about that.

Meanwhile, over at the Bing blog, Microsoft has posted some stats of its own in Bing At Month One:

• Bing said it saw an 8 percent growth in unique users (note this is users, not actual searches, if you’re trying to compare to Compete or other figures)
• Bing said its estimate of “people likely to recommend” visitors to Bing doubled
• Shopping’s said to have had a 3 times increase in visits and 5.42% increase in Cashback transactions
• Travel’s said to have had a 90% increase in traffic