Līve Ambitions

Ever since Bing’s search deal with Yahoo, everyone’s been talking a lot about search engine market share.  Most articles I’ve read talk about Bing’s increase in market share, while others talk about its loss in market share.  So, who do you believe?  It’s hard to say because it comes down to the accuracy of the data.

Currently, there are 3 main sources of data for search engine market share: ComScore, StatCounter and Nielsen.  When you compare the data between the 3 sources, you’ll notice that there’s pretty significant discrepancies in the market share data.  Take for example the US search engine market share for August 2009. 

For the month of August, ComScore reports 64.6% for Google, 19.3% for Yahoo and 9.3% for Microsoft. 

StatCounter reports 77.83% for Google, 10.5% for Yahoo and 9.64% for Bing. 

For the same month, Nielsen reports 64.6% for Google, 16% for Yahoo and 10.7%  for Microsoft. 

As you can see, those numbers are pretty drastically different.  At numbers of this magnitude, every percentage counts.  StatCounter and Nielsen reported gains for Google, while ComScore had Google losing .1% of market share from July to August.  However, all agreed that Microsoft/Bing increased its market share.

The discrepancy comes not only from the methods in which the companies collect their data, but also from which web properties they collect the data for.  Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have various web properties from which they receive significant traffic from, so if the data is not uniform, then you’re pretty much comparing apples to oranges.

According to Web Guild, ComScore collects their data from Internet usage:

• Personal demographics (age, gender, education, etc.)
• Internet usage status
• Connection speed
• Census region
• Household size
• Computers in home
• ISP
• Operating System
• AOL usage
• Work usage

StatCounter collects their data from tracking codes installed in nearly 3 million websites around the world.  From this raw data, they are able to analyze every hit referred by search engines.  In July 2009, StatCounter recorded 136 million referrals made by search engines.

Nielsen utilizes data collected from nearly 100 million blogs, social networks, groups, boards and other consumer-generated media platforms.  They also use consumer panels to supplement their data.