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January 24, 2006
Latest NetRatings Stats Show Status Quo With Search Engines
I always warn not to worry much about month-to-month changes with search popularity stats. The now updated search engine popularity stats I've posted from Nielsen//NetRatings illustrate why. I've added data for the past four months, and it shows no real major changes over that period. Indeed, you can look at all the data going back to the beginning of last year. It shows things have pretty much not changed -- good news for Yahoo, which is happy to maintain the status quo.
Here's one of the two charts from my stats page, which shows the share of searches each search engine was estimated to have among US searchers in a particular month (the page explains more):
What do we see? Yahoo's gained a point and Google's lost one since the beginning of the year. AOL's gained two points and MSN's lost two over the same period.
However, there's a danger in picking any two months and comparing. What if I'd started the chart off in February, rather than January? Then Google stayed the same, Yahoo gained two points, AOL one, and MSN was the big loser with a three point loss.
Maybe you should compare the same months from year to year, November 2004 to November 2005, for example. I still have problems with that. Perhaps one search engine had a new feature or was doing a lot of promotions in a particular month. A month-to-month comparison would still be misleading, in that case.
My preference is to just look at the lines over time. They show me Yahoo's got very slight growth overall, while the rest have some slight decline overall. But none of these changes are particularly dramatic to say that anyone's winning anything, which is why I still feel it's status quo.
For the number inclined, here's the average monthly share for the period of January 2005 through November 2005:
- Google: 46.7%
- Yahoo: 22.0%
- MSN: 12.4%
- AOL: 5.8%
Posted by Danny Sullivan on January 24, 2006 3:26 PM
