Sep 16, 2010 at 11:43am ET by Greg Sterling

Tweet
Buffer

How can Nielsen say Bing has overtaken Yahoo while comScore reports that Yahoo grew and leads Bing by more than 6 points? Someone is right and someone is wrong.

Here is the Nielsen data from earlier this week, showing Microsoft/Bing overtaking Yahoo:

And here is the August comScore data (reported by Citibank):

Google: 65.4% (down from 65.8% in July)
Yahoo: 17.4% (vs. 17.1% in July)
Bing 11.1% (vs. 11% in July)

The comScore data show Bing as flat, not growing. The combined share of Bing and Yahoo is 28.5%.

Among the firms that track search market share Nielsen is the outlier right now. I’m going to ask Nielsen how to explain the discrepancy in the data between the two firms.

In the meantime, how would you explain it?

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

SearchCap:

Get all the top search stories emailed daily!

Like This Story? Please Share!

Other ways to share:

Like Our Site? Follow Us!

Follow @sengineland

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here.

http://searchmarketingcommunications.com Tim Cohn

Nielsen doesn’t reconcile its data.
http://www.michael-martinez.com/ Michael Martinez

Different strokes for different folks. None of these metrics services provide any search measurements worth paying for. They’re all looking at the obsolete metric of page views (a metric no self-respecting SEO would ask a client to pay attention to today).

What they should be reporting is the number of referrals the search engines make to other Websites. That is the only metric that really matters to the advertising and search-based business community.

Who cares how many Google page views Google visitors generate as they click around Google’s system? Sure, they’ll see ads, but they’re clearly not clicking on those ads.

Top News
Briefs
Features
Columns
How To

See More Features

Google Officially Launches Knowledge Graph Carousel For Local Search

Google Webmaster Tools “Links To Your Site” Reporting Bug

Google Authorship Beyond Webpages

Facebook To End Sponsored Search Ads — For Now

George Bush “Miserable Failure” Google Bomb Back, This Time In Knowledge Graph

SMX Advanced: Microsoft’s Gurdeep Singh Pall Talks About Voice Search, Entities & More

Get Our News, Everywhere!

Follow @sengineland

Got a tip? Tell us here!

Most Likes
Most Tweets
Comments

Our Stories Being Liked on Facebook

Search Engine Land Sponsors

Advertise With Us

Click to watch SMX conference video

Join us at an upcoming SMX event:

North America

SMX East - Oct. 1-3, 2013
SMX Social Media Marketing - Nov. 20-21, 2013
SMX West - March 11-13, 2014
SMX Advanced - June 2014

EMEA

SMX Stockholm - Oct. 14-15, 2013
SMX Milan - Nov. 7-8, 2013
SMX Israel - Jan. 2014
SMX Munich - March 25-26, 2014
SMX London - May 2014
SMX Paris - June 2014

APAC

SMX Sydney - April 2014

Search Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.