Microsoft Dips In Compete’s Revised March 08 Search Figures

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)