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The report can be found here. They dont provide details about how they monitor the click-through but you raise a great point.

My last 5 searches didnt' end in going to a website - all the info was put right there on the google searchpage. Checked the weather, the address of a local business, definition of a word, spelling of a word, and looked at a few *images*. Never left google for any of that.

HitWise have graphs that show the decline in market share following the paywall implementation. It shows that The Telegraph (also a slightly right of centre broadsheet) picked up traffic as the Times declined.

What is interesting is that a week after the paywall, there were still users navigating to the website to be confronted with the paywall page - probably because they were being linked to the site from other sites or were using book marks. As they realise that The Times is paywalled, they are not going back.

It's simpler than that. Bing offers nothing that makes users want to use their search engine instead of Google's. Google is a verb in the English language. When people think of finding something on the web, they think of Google.

Bing doesn't even look like Google when one reaches their landing page; this, accompanied with worries about malware search engines and such, would make people who aren't as in-the-know wonder why that isn't Google. Intelligently, Google protected their landing page to prevent Microsoft from doing exactly that. (This mitigates the argument that making Bing the default search page would steal Google's market share.)

I love their photography, but I'm an amateur photographer, so I'm biased. I would bet dollars to donuts (who came up with that saying? It's stupid!) that most people don't care about the photos or necessarily want them in the first place.

Notice that none of these points address differences in search technology. I think that Bing isn't getting the market share they want because they waited WAY too long to make a dent, just like they waited too long to release the Zune (which, like Bing, has few features that would make people want to not get a household name, especially since the inception of the iPod Touch). Worse, Yahoo! was the place for searching the web before Google stole their thunder, and MSN Search was bloated and unmoving even THEN. (Reference: http://www.msn.com/ NOW hasn't changed much from then in terms of bloat.) Hotmail (now Live! Mail) is a good proof to this. Hotmail was LEADING THE WAY in terms of free e-mail services, with Yahoo going head-to-head with them. Their service was pretty good and definitely reliable (I've never had problems with my msn.com or hotmail.com e-mail addresses when I've used them). Even though Google Mail has been released to the public for years, there are still PLENTY of people who use Hotmail (as shown here , as Hotmail ranks higher than gmail).

In regards to their technology, I think it's actually quite good, especially when compared to MSN Search (which was useless 90% of the time). It does suffer a bit on the tail end, though. Example: my school gives every student a MSDN Academic Alliance account upon request, but I always forget the site. (Yes, I can use bookmarks. NO, I will not make one.) Using the search terms 'stevens msdnaa' on Google gives me my IT department's wiki article on it right off the bat as well as many articles below it that also contain the link. (I know the person who runs that blog, as he's also a Stevens student.) Bing, on the other hand, also gives me the link right from the get go, but wanders into irrelevance after the second hit. When I searched that term in Bing for the first time, I didn't even get the link.

This completely contradicts two other reports from the last few days, which has Bing losing market share in December.

http://searchengineland.com/nielsen-yahoo-bing-down-google-up-in-december-33464

http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/search-enginedec2009/

30%?

From http://marketshare.hitslink.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?qprid=5, Google has just under 80%, Baidu at 9%, Yahoo at 7 and Bing at 3.

Even in the US-only, http://www.hitwise.com/press-center/hitwiseHS2004/google-searches-apr-09.php:
Google has 72, Yahoo has 16 and Microsoft has about 6 % (but these numbers are from a couple of months ago, but they don't change that fast).

As per Hitwise, Bing doing reasonably well in UK also.

So it seems the recession is more or less rescuing some classifieds sites while acting as a rocket booster for Craigslist. This meshes well with last week's info about Craigslist replacing MySpace as the top U.S. search term.

And from Hitwise's blog:

Market share of US Internet Visits increased 90% to the Craigslist Cities custom category year over year in February 2009 while visits to All Other Classifieds grew 22%.Visits to All Other Classifieds had been declining for most of 2008 with visits starting to increase in January and February. This suggests that the worsening US economy may be boosting visits to classifieds websites, and contributing to the recent up tick in visits to both Craigslist Cities and All Other Classifieds.

I'm not sold on their evidence. I don't see a huge jump since February of '08 in search popularity. Why do we do this with percentages? We break them down into categories and play the telephone game to distort them for the sole purpose of shock-and-awe reporting leading to ad revenue?

according to hitwise blog traffic comprises only 1.19% of all internet traffic in the UK, and the percentage for the US may be even lower since the market share of blog sites is 1.09% in the UK and 0.73% in the US.

so, saying "blogs = the internet" is not very accurate. monitoring blog sites would be far easier than trying to monitor the 6.2 billion overseas phone calls Americans make each year. unlike the voice data from phone calls, it's far easier to sift through the text data that constitutes most blog traffic. blogs are specifically designed to be easily monitored for updates with technologies like web feeds (RSS & Atom) which allow for easy syndication by encoding semantic information into the serialized data.

additionally, a very robust searching/indexing infrastructure is already in place on the web. there are even blog-specific search engines like Technorati. blogs are a means of publishing & broadcasting information on the web in an easily searchable format. in contrast, phone calls are a form of private 2-way communication.

But that's only among the subset of browsers with their toolbar installed. If we look at Netcraft's take on the subject, Google is 14 of the top 16 Most-Visited, (Yahoo! #23) Hitwise also counts Google the best. Among my friends, nobody under thirty still uses Yahoo! except those who're still clinging to their fifteen year-old mail accounts, which again, Google does better.

The summary refers to stats collected by Hitwise. Where do they get those stats on web usage? From their how-we-do-it:

Hitwise has developed proprietary software that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use to analyze website usage logs created on their network. The anonymous data sent to Hitwise from the ISPs include a range of industry standard metrics relating to the viewing of websites including page requests, visits and average visit length.

IOW, your ISP may be sending your clickstream to Hitwise without your knowledge. That should be flat illegal, I don't care if they "anonymize" it first -- AOL did that with search data they released publicly and got in trouble when reporters were able to identify individuals who made some very private searches. Who is to judge how anonymous it really is?

Even worse, Hitwise is "an Experian company" -- they are owned by one of the big credit reporting companies, which already amass lots of private info about you, making it easier for them to de-anonymize that clickstream.

Hitwise claims to cover 25 million people worldwide including 10 million in the US. Is your ISP is selling your private data without even informing you?

Yahoo! Mail is #1 in webmail, and Hotmail is #2. It's argued whether AOL or Gmail is #3, but since both are ~50 million users as opposed to Yahoo!'s 250 million and Hotmail's 230 million, no-one really cares.

Data sources:
Hitwise's top 20 websites (not just webmail sites)
Gmail traffic analysis by Hitwise

Yahoo! Mail is #1 in webmail, and Hotmail is #2. It's argued whether AOL or Gmail is #3, but since both are ~50 million users as opposed to Yahoo!'s 250 million and Hotmail's 230 million, no-one really cares.

Data sources:
Hitwise's top 20 websites (not just webmail sites)
Gmail traffic analysis by Hitwise

Is it possible that Microsoft will come to regret paying a premium for a business position in an industry it has yet to master, despite extraordinary expenditures (on-line revenue generation). Looky at how much ground Microft must make up to catch Google:
Rank Search Engine Volume
1. www.google.com 65.98%
2. search.yahoo.com 20.88%
3. search.msn.com 5.33%
4. www.ask.com 4.14%

http://www.hitwise.com/datacenter/searchengineanalysis.php

Note that msn searches have declined despite significant investment by the borg in pumping up its performance. There is strong reason to believe that Microsoft will not be able to tie its Yahoo properties to its Microosft Windows and Microsoft Office monopolies, and there is not a single one of Microsoft's properties that have succeeded to drive significantly scaled revenue unless it is tied to the Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office monopolies. Halo was a huge seller, but them Microsoft sold off the Bungie, the creator of Halo, on October 1, 2007 after milking the cow dry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie_Studios

Microsoft took a $1 billion hit on the X-box:

http://www.news.com/Microsoft-to-extend-Xbox-360-warranty,-take-1-billion-hit/2100-1014_3-6195058.html

The X-box was wildy outsold by Wii. MSNBC is popular but not a huge money maker. There is simply nothing outside the Microsoft Windows / Microsoft Office monopoly that shows signs of supporting Microsoft's stock is down 6.35% at the moment on the day, despite the Yahoo announcement. MSFT's stock is trading at $30.51, meaning that it is right back down in the same dolldrums where it has been since Q3 2003 , with no intervening splits!

There are lots of analysts talking about a glut of Vista machines, and wondering if CompUSA's bk might be the canary in Microsoft's coal mine. Microsoft's recent report of a 67% increase on its net reflects ADVANCE SALES of Vista licenses which Microsoft imposes on its vendors. If its vendors are overstocked with Vista machines, you wonder how much more Microsoft can cram down the pipeline in coming quarters.

In the meantime, Linux and Unix boxes have been selling very well on Amazon.com and swept all the categories for Amazon for 2007. From a recent story on /.'s fp:

http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/07/12/29/1959244.shtml
"Computers and handheld devices running default GNU Linux or Unix OSes have swept Amazon's 'best of' list for 2007, according BusinessWire.com for 28 December 2007. Best selling computer? The Nokia Internet Tablet PC, running Linux. Best reviewed computer? The Apple MacBook Pro notebook PC. Most wished for computer? Asus Eee 4G-Galaxy 7-inch PC mobile Internet device, which comes with Xandros Linux pre-installed. And last, but not least, the most frequently gifted computer: The Apple MacBook notebook PC."

Sure, MSFT is powerful, but with this Yahoo acquisition, they are taking on premium-weighted debt, and it really raises a question as to whether that asset will justify the premium. Yahoo has been declining, and it is not clear that the mere acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft will succeed where Microsoft has failed in all of their other non-Windows-Office monopoly. That is the $44 billion dollar question, IMHO.

Maybe, but the possibility of there only being two main search engines out there, with the next largest competitor Ask.com at a paltry 4.1%, is fairly scary.

I think this "gaming the search results" thing is a big reason why it's unhealthy to have such a dominant player, and the Hitwise stats that fictionpuss linked to say that Microsoft's share of the US search engine market is less than 6%. I'm not sure if search.msn.com and live.com are basically the same engine or not; it makes sense that they would be, but if not then it implies live.com has an insignificant market share (i.e. they didn't bother listing it).

So I think the reason Live.com's results aren't gamed is because there's so little to gain from it, relative to Google's. It probably also explains why Google's results were so amazing during their early years compared to AltaVista.

Maybe, but the possibility of there only being two main search engines out there, with the next largest competitor Ask.com at a paltry 4.1%, is fairly scary.

...tends to be overestimated. This comes as a shock to me---and probably you---as Gmail is most popular among those who are younger, collect higher household incomes and are classified as early adopters by marketers. But overall Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail are significantly more popular than Gmail, at least according to statistics compiled by Hitwise Intelligence released in May 2006:

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/05/google_yahoo_and_msn_property.html

Gmail, which has only garnered a 2.54 percent market share, is dwarfed by Yahoo Mail's market share of 42.4 percent. Additional statistics also compiled by Hitwise compare Google, Yahoo and MSN across a number of categories. Predictably, Google dominates the search category but as noted above the webmail category is a different story. Likewise Google Maps is significantly less popular than Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps.

Seriously!?!? The popularity of Mapquest relative to Google Maps rankles me the most. I wonder how these statistics have changed in the last 12-16 months.

I'm not talking about statistics collected at site level. Hitwise place a box at switch elvel with consumer ISP's, tracking everywhere they go and eveything the do. Seriously. Read all about here.

There is little new here. Companies such as http://www.hitwise.com/ have been purchasing raw traffic data for years. They place a box at switch level and monitor everything about everyone and the sell on the reports for profits. The last time I had a quote from them it was in the region of $28k to monitor footfall to a single site for a year. Access to the full data set can run into the hundreds of thousands.

Yahoo is the only search engine that appears to be holding Google off.

Google Blog Search - far behind Technorati

Hitwise samples internet usage by extracting anon web traffic stats from core ISP routers. It's not site-centric and sites don't "need to participate". Hitwise will properly rate any site that shows adequate usage statistics in its (extremely large) samples at the sampled geographic location.

Always nice to know what you're talking about.

Knock yourself out:
http://www.hitwise.com/products-services/how-we-do -it.php

http://www.hitwise.com/products-services/how-we-do -it.php

Well, the Reuters article says this study came from a company called Hitwise. So, let's see what they have to say.

Hmm, it looks like they've got a FAQ that gives a decent amount of information on their tracking methodology and seems to answer most of your questions. They seem to use a variety of sites and ISPs for tracking, though they're very vague as to what. The link also says that they are, in fact, using standardized definitions for the terms you mention, and they're the definitions given in "the industry standard definitions published by the US Internet Advertising Bureau's Media Measurement Task Force on 'Metrics and Methodology'". I'm not sure where to get these definitions, they aren't immediately turning up on a google search.

Still, that should be enough to give you a good start.