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Google's Share of Searches Falling? Or Increasing?
prostoalex writes "Get two research companies in the room, and you'll likely end up with three opinions. Bear Sterns quotes ComScore Networks data, which says that Google's share of searches is slipping, down to 36.9% in June 2005. WebSideStory, a Web research company, on the other hand, claims that in June 2005 Google hit a new record as far as share of searches, hitting 52%, and leaving rivals far behind."
IT's far more important _which_ searches they're getting. In my online advertising efforts, the quality of traffic coming from Google is FAR superior to what we're getting out of MSN, AOL, etc.
Well if the amount of searches google is getting is going down -- you have to account for where they are going.
Are the lost searches going to elsewhere to altavista, ask jeeves, dogpile?
How can you conduct research if you can't account for where the "lost searches" have gone to? How can they tell it's not an error in their study?
How could anyone get conclusive results without operating inside of google, and inside of yahoo? It seems to me like the *best* you can do is have a bunch of websites log what URL's they're coming from, but that's inconclusive; some users will use one search engine repeatedly just to find an article, while other's will search for the same thing across a lot of search engines.
I just don't see how anyone could come to a result that's completely objective.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Have Google searches replaced DNS for web name lookup? Not yet, you say? Then they aren't the most popular search engine yet!
Do you like Japanese imports?
The numbers -- for those interested.
Google's market share of US searches for June 2005 was at 36.9% compared with 37.5% in May 2005. Yahoo! had a 30.4% share, and MSN had a share of 15.7%. Bear Stearns noted that Google's query volume rose 36% YTY versus a 28% increase for the industry, outpacing Yahoo!'s 32% increase but trailing MSN's 42% increase. Month-to-month, Google's query volume declined 6%, which compares with a 4% decline for Yahoo!, a 1% decline for MSN, a 4% decline for AOL, and a 7% decline for Ask Jeeves. In Q2 2005 unique searchers versus Q2 2004 increased 31% for Google, 21% for Yahoo, and 14% for the industry, while the number of searches in Q2 2005 increased 38% for Google, 42% for Yahoo, and 31% for the industry.
There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Personally I can't remember the last time I used something other than Google for a search and what other search engine has had it's name verbed in common usage? Even back in the day when AltaVista was the search engine of choice I never heard anyone say "AltaVista it".
When I first read the report on the 19th (Google - 36.9%, Yahoo! - 30.4%, MSN - 15.7%), I called BS. Here's my reasoning. Just before Star Wars was released, I held the number one search spot for "Star Wars Trailer" (no quotes) on ALL three mentioned search engines for a week. I got a million hits in about 2 days. 69% were Google, 14% from Yahoo and 2% from MSN.
I later moved down to 4th in Google but held my place in Y!/MSN. The scores shifted very slightly but remained in favor of Google. Unless this proves that Star Wars geeks are primarily Google users, it proves the surveys innaccurate in favor of MSN and Yahoo!.
That's my 0.02.
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