When I did my Ratings Service Faceoff: Search Share Compared, June 2007 To March 2008 post last week, I noted that Microsoft had an odd increase according to Compete for March 2008. The company now says this was due to Live Search Club traffic that it shouldn’t have counted. Microsoft’s US share for March 2008 drops from 10.2% to 8.5% as a result. From Compete’s blog post:

As March search stats were published by the other major third party measurement companies over the past few weeks I started to get a little worried about our post from a couple of weeks ago. So we decided to go a little deeper into our data and as a result we did an extensive page level look at our search counts. Low and behold, it turns out we got bitten again by the Club Live bug. You would think that after the hubbub raised over Club Live last July we would have learned our lesson. Ever since that post last July we have been filtering out Club Live generated searches. It turns out that in February, MSN launched some new Club Live games that generated a solid amount of interest and skewed our March search market share report. So here I am a couple weeks later, after umpteen blogs have reposted our numbers and any number of bloggers have contrasted our results with the other third party measurement folks. I was hoping to get this out before Danny put together this great analysis, but alas it did not happen.

Here’s the before and after from the revisions:

• Google: Before 69.4%, After 70.7%
• Yahoo: Before 14.8%, After 15.1%
• Microsoft: Before 10.2%, After 8.5%
• Ask: Before 3.7%, After, 3.8%

My previous post, Compete: Microsoft Gains Share; Google Hits New High In Raw Searches, still shows the old figures and trends prior to this. I’m not going to redo the charts because it’s a lot of work! I’ll update them the next time fresh Compete figures come out.

See also the aforementioned Ratings Service Faceoff: Search Share Compared, June 2007 To March 2008 post. There, the main differences due to the Compete revised figures:

• Compete agrees with other services that Google grew share in March 2008 or stayed even with the previous month.
   
• Microsoft no longer shows a sharp rise in March, making Nielsen the only one of four major services to report this (which makes you wonder if Live Search queries caused that spike, too)

Related Topics: Stats: Compete | Stats: Popularity

About The Author: 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. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan