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.

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:

Yesterday comScore reported search numbers for August. What they show is growth in overall search volume, including at Google sites (except YouTube). Google has 2.5 times the search volume as Yahoo and Microsoft combined. But Microsoft’s Bing also grew its share of the overall US search market from 8.9 percent in July to 9.3 percent in August. Here are the charts:

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.

A report analyzing traffic and click-through rates from ad network Chikita finds that “Bing users are over 50% more likely to click an ad on your site than Google users.” What this means, according to the post, is those who arrive at third party sites via Bing click more frequently on ads on those sites than those coming through Google. TechCrunch offers a bit more detail and speculation about why this might be (i.e., “the law of large numbers”). According to Chikita, the respective click rates are:

• 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.

Mobile search engine Taptu has just launched a free iPhone app (”alternative search machine”). It’s the first iPhone-specific search engine but Taptu has been doing mobile search for some time. According to the company the engine crawls the web and indexes “iPhone friendly pages” that are optimized for the device. The index is much smaller than a conventional search engine but “growing every day” according to Taptu.

It offers “preview cards” that create a very Palm Pre-like experience. You flick or horizontally scroll through preview pages (showing mostly real-time images of the sites) and then touch/click to go to the source page. There are no links in search results accordingly. Here’s a video showing how it works:

There’s also a cascading menu that allows for related searches or refinement by content source with a single touch.

In a related bit of news comScore and AdMob put out data today from a survey that involved roughly 7,300 US consumers (ages 13 and older) on iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The study revealed demographic differences between the groups, but the most important and striking finding released showed that a substantial minority of the survey respondents (40+ percent) are going online with their mobile devices more often than through a PC.

While this group arguably represents the “bleeding edge” (to use the cliche) of the mobile market, this behavior can’t be ignored by advertisers. As we argued during the SMX Advanced panel on mobile PPC, you’ve got to experiment with mobile today to understand it — because there may be a day when there are more searches on mobile devices than on the PC.

That’s already true in selected developing nations according to Yahoo. I’ve got a little more on the AdMob data on LocalMobileSearch.

In the world of competition between and among websites, search engines and online publishers there is also the “behind the scenes” competition between Nielsen and comScore. Both want to be the source of record for traffic data and both are occasionally the subject of controversy.

There was the incident early in 2008 where comScore put out a report that Google’s paid clicks were down, sending Google shares down. But when Google announced a very strong Q1, comScore shares then took a hit and the company had to go into damage control mode. More recently Nielsen reported that despite Twitter’s massive growth it was only “retaining” 40% of users. There was an immediate and vocal backlash, putting Nielsen on the defensive. However the company stood by its numbers after a second look.

Despite outward confidence and appearances of objectivity, these measurement services are subject to human error (interpreting the data) and occasionally just screw up. However, advertisers, banks, the press and others with an interest in tracking uniques and traffic growth don’t trust the numbers put out by the publishers themselves. So third party measurement and validation is a high stakes game.

The newest metrics controversy, this time pitting comScore against Nielsen, involves Hulu. As the New York Times reports, comScore recently reported almost 42 million unique visitors for Hulu compared with only 8.9 million according to Nielsen. However both data providers show high percentage growth at Hulu. But Hulu was frustrated and upset with the Nielsen figures that show unique visitors declining from March to April.

Quantcast and Compete, imperfect and in disagreement themselves, show Hulu’s numbers closer to those put out by Nielsen than comScore’s estimates:

Google Trends data sits between the Nielsen and comScore numbers:

The obvious conclusion is that one has to look broadly at all the numbers and use the consensus and directional trends. This is something of a mantra for Danny in reviewing the search market share data.

I’ve asked Hitwise to weigh in and will update this story if they do.

According to data released yesterday by the IAB/PwC on Q4 and full year 2008 online advertising revenues, performance-based advertising and search gained while other segments declined slightly or were flat. Overall, online advertising grew 10.6% in 2008 to reach $23.4 billion. US online ad revenue in Q4 was $6.1 billion, up from $5.8 billion in the third quarter of last year. Especially noteworthy for the readers of this blog, search ad revenues comprised 46 percent of Q4 online ad revenues, up from 42 percent a year ago.

Here are a selection of charts from the report:

For all the talk of the collapse of display, usage remained constant in 2008 vs. 2007. By contrast, rich media and video lost share and so did classifieds, which has continued to lose share over the past four years. Also worthy of note is the big jump in performance based ads vs. CPM pricing. What that means is that more marketers were buying display advertising on a PPC basis. It also reflects the strength of search marketing at a time of economic uncertainty.

On a related note, eMarketer publishes some of SEMPO’s numbers regarding the breakdown of spending in the search market in 2008:

SEMPO’s survey data and projections indicate that $13.5 billion was spent on SEM last year. This is a broader category than the IAB’s search category; it includes technology and SEO-related spending. It also includes fees and costs not reflected in direct ad spending. The IAB and SEMPO numbers don’t line up but the different definitions of the market could help account for the relatively sizable discrepancy between the IAB 2008 search revenue number ($10.5 billion) and SEMPO’s SEM spending figure ($13.5 billion).

Metrics firm comScore released mobile internet usage data earlier today. It indicates significant growth in the numbers of people accessing the internet from their mobile phones vs. a year ago. The company says that today there are just over 63 million mobile web users in the US and 35 percent of them are online via their handset daily.

The daily mobile internet user population has more than doubled in one year:

I’ve written up the findings in some detail on my LocalMobileSearch blog.

While the highest frequency users are on smartphones and the iPhone in particular, comScore says that 70 percent of the traffic is coming from so-called feature phones (conventional cellphones).

The fastest growing, high-volume daily mobile internet activities, according to comScore are the following:

1. Access news and information
2. Access social network or blog
3. Financial information
4. Movies
5. Business directories
6. Entertainment news

In terms of search, here’s what comScore told me about mobile search volumes (left column is 1/08 and right is 1/09):

Source: comScore (3/09)

If we were to cross reference the above data we’d probably see that these frequency numbers are tied directly to the type of handset that people own: more frequency for smartphones and the iPhone, less for more conventional cellphones. Nonetheless, these numbers are impressive and should get the attention of marketers everywhere. We should also continue to see dramatic growth in both mobile web access and search query volumes in the next several years as more and more people use mobile devices to get to the internet.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

More than half of all search queries are at least three words long, and more than a third are four words or longer. That’s according to Hitwise data (PDF) released today:

As the chart shows, 1- and 2-word queries are becoming less common, while 4-, 5-, and all the way up to 8+ word queries are becoming more common. The numbers are very similar to what Hitwise shared at SMX West a couple weeks ago.

The takeaway point here is that the so-called long tail of search continues to get longer. As searchers get more sophisticated in how they use Google, Yahoo, Live Search, etc., it opens up more opportunities for webmasters and marketers to create content and/or ads that captures these longer search queries.

Also in the same Hitwise announcement: Google’s search share held steady at 72% in January. Yahoo also held steady at 17.8%. MSN/Live Search saw a slight drop from the month before, while Ask saw a slight increase.

Microsoft just released results of a survey of 400 small businesses (SMBs) that shows they continue to struggle with search marketing (how to think about it, how to do it). This is consistent with what I and others have observed about the majority of SMBs, even those with websites. The search engines want to reach this massive market directly but have found it very difficult to do so without working with established sales channels and partners (newspapers, yellow pages, webhosts, etc.) that have existing SMB relationships. That can be problematic in some cases because the various revenue sharing agreements diminish the available funds for a paid search buy (but that’s a lengthy topic for another time).

First some context. Here’s a breakdown of US businesses by headcount according to US Census data:

Source: US Census (2004)

All but a tiny fraction US businesses have less than 100 employees. Most have fewer than four.

Now back to what the Microsoft survey found:

• The study revealed that 59 percent of small businesses with Web sites don’t currently use paid search marketing, and of those, 90 percent have never even attempted it.
• Nearly nine in 10 (89 percent) feared keywords may become too expensive.
• Eighty-one percent questioned if paid search marketing is the best use of their marketing budgets.
• One quarter of respondents believe paid search marketing is too complex.
• Twenty-one percent thought it would be too time-consuming.
• Thirty-five percent felt they would need an agency to help set up a search marketing campaign.

Opus Research recently found in an earlier SMB advertiser survey (n=1089, 8/08), among SMBs who did no online marketing, the main reason was confusion:

Source: Opus Research, AllBusiness.com (2008)

This is “online marketing” in general and not search per se. But the findings, as the Microsoft data suggest, would be magnified for search among those not doing it. However the same Opus survey found that paid search was cited as the third most effective marketing method among a list of 15 media types, after email marketing and print newspapers. So those doing it have seen its value presumably.

Yet even among those SMBs that are doing search marketing, many are doing it in ways that diminsh the effectiveness of their spend. SEM platform provider Clickable found that more than 50% of 1,000 SMBs on its platform failed to implement conversion tracking and were thus wasting some of their budget by not really gaining insight into the true ROI of their keywords.

While progressive SMBs and “e-tailers” were among the first to adopt paid search as a direct response medium, the majority of small businesses are mystified by the mechanics — the “how” — of search and need simple tools and/or third party help. Yet their spend is such that it may be hard for a third party without a substantially automated/scalable platform to build a sustainable business model around it. For example, Palore recently found the following about the average paid search spend of certain categories of SMBs:

Source: Palore

But there are other data that show an even smaller monthly spend. The volume is great, but the spend is relatively low. Unless or until the engines can provide an even more simplified way to do paid search they’re unlikely to acquire large numbers of additional SMB advertisers, except through complex third party relationships. (Google “simple ads” has yet to appear.)

Thus for SMBs and search engines there will likely continue to be challenges and frustration — on both sides — for at least the foreseeable future.