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June 20, 2008

comScore May 2008 Search Engine Rankings Data is Out

comScore has released their May 2008 U.S. Search Engine Rankings and no major changes have occurred. Google sites came in first, at 61.8% up .2% from April. Yahoo and Ask also saw .2% gains, and they came at the expense of Microsoft and AOL, which suffered .6% loss and .1% decline respectively.

10.8 billion searches were conducted in May, a 2% increase over April. Google sites saw 6.7 billion of those searches while Yahoo saw 2.2 billion. Microsoft sites saw 920 million searches on their sites. Check out the charts below for a breakdown of the data.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 29, 2008

comScore Acquires M:Metrics

comScore has acquired mobile measurement company M:Metrics. The acquisition will include three measurement products:

MobiLens is a syndicated monthly online survey that captures overall mobile phone usage of a representative sample of more than 40,000 mobile device users.

MeterDirect is an on-device meter that passively measures the mobile Internet behavior and media consumption of more than 4,000 existing Smartphone panelists on more than 280 device models.

M:Ad is a mobile ad tracking service that continuously monitors clickable display advertising.

“With the substantial growth of 3G devices and Internet friendly handsets, we believe we are now at an inflection point in Internet usage on mobile devices,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore’s president and chief executive officer. “Our acquisition of M:Metrics makes comScore an immediate market leader in this space and positions comScore to deliver significant shareholder value as wireless carriers, telecom equipment providers, media companies, advertising agencies, online publishers, and marketers extend their reach into the mobile Internet world.”

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 22, 2008

Google Sees Search Share Growth in April, Others Decline

Google was the only one of the "big" search engines to experience month-over-month growth in April 2008, according to U.S. search engine rankings released by comScore. Overall, searches by Americans declined by 2%. Core search engines received 10.6 billion of the total searches, with Google seeing over 6.5 billion, Yahoo 2.2 billion and Microsoft 961 million. Here's the stats:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 15, 2008

ComScore Places Google Sites Ahead of Yahoo Sites for First Time

While Google has dominated the search market, it's Yahoo that's been the leader as a destination site (think email, photos, etc.), according to published reports. But the tide is turning in that field, as comScore reported Google sites finally overtook Yahoo sites in the month of April.

But unlike its lead in search, this lead is a slight one. Only 466,000 visitors separate the #1 and #2 slots in this field. Here's the raw data for April:

Google sites saw 141.1 million visitors, up 18% year over year. Yahoo sites saw 140.6 million visitors, up 7% year over year. Microsoft trailed in third at 121 million.

Yahoo does still lead in page views, meaning either people are returning or are more engaged in Yahoo content. Yahoo had 33.6 billion page views while Google saw 28.7 billion page views.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

May 7, 2008

Google Sees 79% European Market Share in March 2008

So many Europeans use Google for search, you have to wonder if they know that other search engines exist. A whopping 79% of searches were conducted on Google in the month of March, according to comScore. That amounts to 19 billion. No wonder European regulators are so wary of a Googleopoly.

Coming in second was eBay with 3.1% followed by Russian search engine Yandex with 2.2%. Yahoo came in fourth at 2.0% with Microsoft rounding out the top 5 at 1.9%.

Google's overwhelming dominance didn't prevent the EU from approving its acquisition of DoubleClick earlier this year.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:33 AM | Permalink

April 10, 2008

comScore launches Video Metrix in Canada, France, Germany and UK

comScore today announced the availability of comScore Video Metrix in four new markets: Canada, France, Germany and the UK. comScore Video Metrix, which was first launched in the US more than two years ago, now provides online video measurement across all five of these countries.

This enables search engine marketers "to better plan advertising to a highly-engaged, but often elusive audience, that typically spends less time with traditional media,” Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore, said in a press release.

Of interest to search engine marketers planning to attend SES Toronto, comScore found that Canada has the heaviest online video viewing activity.

Of the five countries currently reported by comScore Video Metrix, online video had the highest reach in Canada, where 19 million viewers viewed a video online in December, representing 89 percent of the total online population age 15 and older. The UK was next with an 87 percent reach, followed by France with an 84 percent reach and Germany with an 81 percent reach. Penetration was slightly lower in the US, where online video reached 78 percent of the total online population.

Canada’s online video audience also viewed more videos than any of the other reported countries, averaging 112 videos per viewer for the month of December, followed by the UK with 108 videos per viewer, Germany with 92 videos per viewer, and France with 89 videos per viewer. Again, US activity was slightly lower, averaging 77 videos per viewer in December.

Driven largely by video viewership at YouTube, Google Sites led as the most popular online video destination in all reported countries. However, beyond this there were strong performances from key local players, with BBC Sites ranked second in the UK, DailyMotion.com ranked second in France, and Vivendi ranked second in Germany. Microsoft Sites was amongst the top 5 ranked video sites in the US, UK and Canada, but not in France and Germany.

Many search engine marketers have started creating online video on a much larger scale this year.

For example, the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo channel on YouTube now has more than 80 video interviews with speakers and exhibitors posted from SES London and SES New York 2008. Combined, they've received 10,932 views across all the videos as of this morning.

The most popular video in the SES channel is my interview with Nick Carr, the author of "The Big Switch," conducted before his keynote presentation at SES London.

The Big Switch by Nick Carr -- SES London 2008

And more video interviews are planned for SES Toronto 2008. So, stay tuned. Don't touch that dial. Film at 11.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 10:19 AM | Permalink

March 5, 2008

SEW Experts: The Beginning of the End? Or the End of the Beginning?

ComScore's recent data showing flat paid search growth for Google led many in the media to declare that the paid search sky was falling. But the rush to judgment was wrong, and there are other factors involved. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "The Beginning of the End? Or the End of the Beginning?," Kevin Ryan outlines the saga of misread numbers, media's desire to show failure that isn't there, and the fickleness of financial markets.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

November 28, 2007

SEW Experts: Understanding the Global Search Marketplace - Part 2

Searches are up all over the world, and it's an interesting juxtaposition to think of the rest of the world as "emerging" compared to North America and Europe. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Understanding the Global Search Marketplace - Part 2," Kevin Ryan looks at some global search data provided by comScore to see if any search provider is staking a claim to the title of global search leader.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

November 14, 2007

SEW Experts: Understanding the Global Search Marketplace - Part 1

The search world is expanding. Global players like Google, Yahoo, Baidu and Microsoft are competing to be the single resource for accessing information. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Understanding the Global Search Marketplace - Part 1," Kevin Ryan begins an exploration of global search marketing, with some exclusive comScore data.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 4, 2007

ComScore Launches Search Marketing Intelligence Service

Market research firm comScore has launched a search marketing-specific intelligence service, comScore Marketer. Using data collected from comScore's panel of more than 2 million consumers, the service can offer search marketers insight into their own visitors, as well as their competitors and partners.

"We have this rich base of panelists where we pick up online behavior, and we pick up search behavior too," said Dan Lackner, senior VP at comScore. "It made sense to harvest the data we collect to help our customers allocate their marketing dollars more efficiently."

ComScore Marketer is a subscription service, with data updated monthly. It presents the marketer with site-specific data, such as traffic and keyword referral data, as well as comparisons within a site category or among competitors' sites.

It also presents visitor data based on the search query, identifying other sites and categories frequented by others who typed in that query. That information will allow a marketer to find other sites to consider for advertising to increase their reach, or excluding sites that are being overexposed to control frequency, said Steve Dennen, comScore's senior director of market research.

"Over the last six to nine months, there's been a movement in the industry to get search out of the silo, and make it work together with other advertising," Dennen said. "This lets them reach people at different touchpoints, and find other places to reach similar people."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:37 AM | Permalink

August 1, 2007

New Yahoo! comScore Study on Shopping Behavior

The Yahoo! comScore study released this week reaffirms that shoppers who pre-shop products on the Web in fact purchase more at off-line stores. The study, which was designed to identify whether of search and display advertising had an impact on in-store sales was conducted during April 2006 to January 2007. This large study involved a sample of more than 175,000 comScore panelists and five major retailers including major national department stores, a major apparel retailer and a major supplier of office products. The study used behaviorally and demographically similar panels to compare the purchasing behavior of those exposed to online advertising with the behavior of those who were not exposed.

The results showed that consumers exposed to online advertising tend to research or ‘pre-shop’ products online prior to purchase. This behavior ultimately leads to increased in-store sales. The study also found that ‘pre-shoppers’ spend an average of 41 percent more in-store when compared to consumers not exposed to online advertising.

To those familiar with current retail shopping behaviors or tracking the growth of online retailing will not find these findings surprising. Although online sales continue to grow, they remain just a fraction of in-store retail sales; however, exposure to online advertising has increased dramatically. Logically, exposure to this volume of advertising has to have an impact, but the impact’s dimensions were not spelled out previously.

The Yahoo! and comScore study showed that:

Exposure to online advertising resulted in increased consumer engagement resulting in consumers viewing an average of six more pages during the period in which they were researching compared to those not exposed to advertising.

Incremental sales occur off-line with almost 90 percent of the incremental sales generated by online advertising taking place in-store:

Consumers exposed to online advertising spent an incremental six dollars in-store for every one dollar spent online.

Integrated search and display campaigns create maximum impact leading to deeper consumer engagement and increased sales.

As the use of the Web and familiarity with search advertising has grown, search and online display ads are fulfilling a demand generation function similar to what used to occur with other media. For search marketers this study presents a strong case for using search ads in combination with display campaigns. The study also strongly highlights the need for more thorough online to offline results tracking so that demand generation is accurately sourced and the lift in store sales generated by these online efforts can be quantified and their value accurately assessed.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 12:25 PM | Permalink

June 12, 2007

Younger Folks Like Ads More

Surprise, surprise. As an advertiser, you probably believe that Gen X/Yers are too savvy to be swayed by the singing Alka Seltzer tablet of days gone by. You think twice about going into unbridled territory, such as user-generated content (UGC) sites, with a purely corporate agenda. Well, don’t worry so much about advertising on MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and others anymore.

It turns out that 18-34 year olds are not as opposed to being sold to as we all thought. According to ComScore, younger consumers are noticeably more receptive than their counterparts to all kinds of advertising on UGC sites.

Here’s how much more than other age groups:

I am Receptive: 41% (18-34) versus 30% (35-54) and 23% (55+) Advertising is Trustworthy: 28% (18-34) versus 22% (35-54) and 17% (55+) Advertising is Useful: 40% (18-34) versus 33% (35-54) and 28% (55+)

These younger consumers trust advertising in certain categories more than others. Not surprisingly, some 66% polled are receptive to entertainment ads. Other categories like apparel, food, electronics, travel, telecom and autos do well too. However “higher trust” areas like financial services and drugs are not well-received here.

This is just the beginning, since UGC sites are far from the chief attention-grabbing medium. That award still goes to TV, where 85% notice commercials. Over half notice ads on news/media or corporate sites, while only 28% pay any attention on UGC sites. Yet these findings amaze me – we are seeing a big shift in attitudes.

Posted by Deborah Richman at 12:04 AM | Permalink

March 21, 2007

February Share of Search Numbers Are In

February share-of-searches numbers are in from comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings, with Google widening its lead over Yahoo once again, though the two had different findings for the direction of Yahoo's share. Microsoft came in third while losing share.

According to Nielsen//NetRatings, 55.8% of searches were done on Google last month, a gain of 7.3 percentage points over last year. Meanwhile, comScore attributes 48.1% share to Google, a 5.9-point change from February 2006.

For Yahoo, Nielsen//NetRatings pegs its share at 20.7%, a 1.8-point loss; while comScore shows 28.1%, a 0.6-point year-to-year gain.

Microsoft comes in third, with 9.6% share, down 1.1 points, according to Nielsen//NetRatings; and 10.5% share according to comScore, a 2.9-point decline over February 2006.

Ask maintains its position in fourth place, according to comScore, with 5.0% share, a 1.0-point decline. Nielsen//NetRatings has AOL in fourth, with 5.1% share of searches, with Ask at 2.0%

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 3:33 PM | Permalink

February 2, 2007

ComScore, FM Team Up for Analytics Research

ComScore Networks has teamed up with John Battelle's Federated Media (FM) Publishing for a research and development initiative to come up with a way to measure audiences of blogs and community-driven sites. As part of the research, comScore will build a database using a customized weighting and projection system, which is intended to more accurately measure audience size and demographics that have previously been available from comScore only for larger sites.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 8:07 PM | Permalink

January 16, 2007

comScore Reports December Search Market Share

In addition to Compete's report, we have comScore's December qSearch analysis of U.S. search market share.

Google grew its lead slightly to 47.3 percent, up 0.4 percentage points over November. Yahoo gained three points to 28.5 percent market share. Microsoft sites (including MSN Search and Live Search) dipped by 0.5 points to 10.5 percent share; Ask.com and related IAC sites, like Excite and MyWay, lost 0.1 point to keep fourth place with 5.4 percent share; and AOL and the Time Warner network remain in fifth place with 4.9 percent market share, down 0.2 points in December.

All the engines basically continue on the same trends -- Google slightly up, Microsoft slightly down, and Yahoo, Ask and AOL fairly flat. The trends are especially apparent if you look with a long view, as Danny did at Search Engine Land.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:45 AM | Permalink

December 27, 2006

Page Views -- Losing Its Front-Runner Status

When discussing site traffic, you always hear about Unique Visitors or Page Views. Although actual numbers are endlessly debated, these metrics are treated as the lingua franca among publishers and advertisers. Yet even these stalwarts change, and page views will lose its front-runner status during 2007. It's about time.

Even comScore says page views are not enough. They are planning to incorporate the missing consumption of dynamic content. In last week's press release, CEO Magid Abraham announced "enhanced metrics of user engagement and advertising exposure" next year. He explained the need to reflect "new technologies such as AJAX - which enable real-time site updates without needing to refresh a page."

What will replace or enhance page views? No word yet. There's an opportunity to get this right, not only calculations but also industry-wide acceptance. Micro Persuasion believes that suppliers should start thinking small, as marketers focus on the "influence circles within the niches that matter to them." Yet the big ad buyers will not evaporate, and also require ongoing support.

Some "pages-plus" metric is overdue, one that captures unique content and ad views. It needs to be something that's projected and tracked by everyone. Its biases must be explained and at least partially understood. Finally, it should become the new denominator for calculating effective RPMs, which means it will have to be lingua franca again.

A lot is riding on this metric, and I look forward to the debate.

Posted by Deborah Richman at 12:44 PM | Permalink

November 22, 2006

Search Popularity Stats, Sliced & Diced

Catch up time on search engine popularity stats. comScore and NetRatings put out October 2006 figures this week, plus Hitwise released those earlier this month. Google's still tops, Yahoo still strong, Microsoft is still dropping and Ask surpasses AOL's search share, according to comScore. Below, the trend from all of them over the past year, plus my long-promised compare-and-contrast charts.

First, let's do a compare-and-contrast table with the basic figures from each service. These show the estimated share of the number of searches that happened in the United States in October 2006.

Month

comScore

NetRatings

Hitwise

Google

45.4%

49.6%

60.9%

Yahoo

28.2%

23.9%

22.3%

Microsoft

11.7%

8.8%

10.6%

Ask

5.8%

2.8%

4.3%

AOL

5.4%

6.2%

0.5%

Others

3.5%

8.7%

1.2%

Across the board, all the services put Google in the lead, Yahoo second and Microsoft's Windows Live third (sorry, I still say MSN on the chart). Two of the services put Ask over AOL in the fourth place spot. More analysis on all this in the service trend charts, below.

Here's comScore figures over the past year:

Remember that Google drop back in July, when lots of people started freaking out about the demise of the Big G. I warned not to focus on month-to-month changes. Since then, Google's recovered according to comScore and keeps going.

Yahoo's seen declines since July, but not enough to send up the alarm bells. They are well within the usual ranges that I've discussed are the things to watch. That range is the 25 to 30 percent slice of the chart.

In contrast, Microsoft continues on its long, steady drop in popularity. It will especially be interesting to see the figures in the next few months, as IE7 rolls out and potentially gives Microsoft Live Search a bump. Or not. My Searching Via Internet Explorer 7 & The Battle To Be The Default Search Engine article talks more about the changes in IE7 that might help drive traffic.

Unnoticed, as far as I can tell, is the fact that in September, Ask overtook AOL for the fourth slot in the search engine share battle. That's a big deal. In fact, according to comScore, AOL is on track to plunge out of the 5 to 10 percent band it has occupied over the past year. Ask is hanging in there.

Of course, the traffic for Ask isn't just for Ask.com. It's for the combination of sites that Ask owns or controls, including places like Excite, iWon, MyWay.com and My Web Search. Still, as a network, Ask remains controlling a significant chunk of the search space.

That's what comScore says. Now let's see how it looks at NetRatings:

Basically, NetRatings shows status quo. Google and Yahoo keep ticking along at the same levels. So does Ask. AOL hangs in roughly the same general range. It's Microsoft Windows Live (MSN on the chart) that catches my eye most with consistent decline.

Also note that with NetRatings, AOL is well above Ask. That's because NetRatings is only reporting the share for Ask.com. If other Ask-owned properties were combined, then the Ask figure would be higher. Much of that traffic instead flows into the "Other" line.

Next to Hitwise:

Hitwise doesn't go back as far as NetRatings and comScore, so it's harder to feel confident about trends. But the trends are similar to comScore, a slight Google rise, Yahoo holding steady, Ask above AOL and that decline of MSN.

Now back to what I promised ages ago, the old-style comparison charts I used to do. Here are all three services together, showing share score for October 2006:

Now let me explain what I think is unique in charting the figures this way. Usually, you'd see a comparison using a bar chart. Shares for Google from all three services would be shown as three bars next to each other, then the same for Yahoo and so on.

I like doing these as line charts, because it makes the gaps more noticeable and gives you a trend as well.

For example, you can see how all the services rate Google tops, though the amount Google is above the others may vary. Conclusion? While Google's exact popularity is uncertain, it's clearly more popular than anyone else, the services agree.

Notice that with Yahoo, they all agree it is in second place and the general range of popularity is closer (roughly between 25 to 30 percent). For MSN (Windows Live), the all come together. When you hit AOL, Hitwise is the big player that's way off the mark from the other two. I've covered this before, that I don't think Hitwise is getting accurate information about AOL that causes this. But seeing the two big skews -- that Hitwise puts Google so high above the others and AOL so low -- makes me think that if AOL was counted correctly, then Hitwise would be reflecting the same general trend as the others.

Now let's trend each of the major search engines using figures from all three services. Here's Google:

Fair to say, Google's pretty much continuing to grow, despite the hiccups you might see from time-to-time on various services.

Here's Yahoo:

Generally, I think it's fair to say that Yahoo had a spike in popularity earlier this year but has settled down more to its usual levels. That's not bad. It has healthy, long-term traffic. What remains to be seen is if it can grow that traffic more in the long term.

Here's Microsoft:

Slice it how you want, no one is reporting a pretty picture for Microsoft. Unlike Yahoo, they haven't held share. It's drop, drop, drop.

Here's AOL, which similar to Microsoft, shows drops:

I'm sorry I don't have the similar chart for Ask. I'll try to add it later, but I shut my spreadsheet (argh) before saving my comparison numbers, so I have some more copy and pasting to do to get that chart back.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:19 AM | Permalink

October 13, 2006

Consumer Satisfaction Doesn't Equal Market Share

Earlier this week J.D. Power and Associates released the findings of its "2006 Residential Online Service Customer Satisfaction Study." The study, based on a survey of more than 10,000 U.S. residential Internet users, found that Yahoo Messenger ranked the highest among IM clients and that – and this is something of a surprise – InfoSpace's Dogpile had the highest rankings among search engines.

Here are the rankings of IM clients in terms of customer satisfaction:

1. Yahoo! Messenger 2. MSN Messenger 3. Windows Messenger 4. Instant Message Average 5. Google Talk 6. Trillian 7. AIM/AOL Instant Messenger

Compare that to U.S. IM market share (per Nielsen//Netratings):

1. AOL 2. MSN 3. Yahoo 4. Google

The J.D. Power report also said that U.S. residential IM usage was flat vs. 2005, at 36%. Yet the survey found that "among customers who report using IM on a regular or occasional basis, nearly 70 percent report that to some degree, instant messaging has replaced the use of traditional telephones." There are implications here for traditional telephony that are striking and worth further exploration.

Probably more interesting to readers of this blog are the search-engine findings. The survey reported that 75% of residential Internet subscribers used multiple search engines.

Here's the market-share breakdown that J.D. Power found:

1. Google: 51% (up 8 points from 2005) 2. Yahoo: 17% (down 4 points) 3. AOL: 9% (down 1 point)

The release doesn't report on the respective shares of Ask or MSN/Windows Live. Presumably they constitute the remaining 23% of usage or something approaching that.

Compare comScore August search market share data:

1. Google Sites: 44% 2. Yahoo: 28.7% 3. MSN: 12.5% 4. AOL: 5.6% 5. Ask: 5.5%

Here are the J.D. Power survey's customer satisfaction findings. Little used Dogpile was ranked number one:

1. Dogpile 2. Ask.com 3. Google 4. Yahoo! Search 5. AOL Search 6. MSN Search 7. Internet Explorer (treated as a search engine in the survey)

I don't have any insight into the survey methodology so we have to take the results at face value. But 10,000+ respondents is a very large sample. A disconnect is the difference between search engine market share and the satisfaction ratings. Based on these findings one would think that if Ask and (especially) Dogpile could gain broader awareness and visibility they might be able to gain some share.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 11:19 AM | Permalink

October 6, 2006

MySpace: Not Just For The Under 30 Crowd

As a kind of twist on that old 60's mantra, social networking's slogan might have been: not for anyone over 30 -- or so we thought. As is being widely covered, comScore reported and MySpace apparently confirmed that the average age of its users is going up. More than 50% of its users in August were over 35. This represents a kind of mainstreaming of social networking in one way of looking at it. MySpace, as you remember, has a deal with Google in which the latter will pay a guaranteed $900 million over a three-year period to be the search and paid search provider on the site.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 11:42 AM | Permalink

October 3, 2006

vFlyer Seeks To Overcome Classifieds Fragmentation For Sellers

From a marketer's point of view, one of the undesirable characteristics of the Internet in general and the local Internet in particular is audience fragmentation. Like other segments in local, classifieds are growing -- dramatically according to comScore (99% year over year). The firm also shows 37.4 million users in July to 10 high-traffic "classifieds" sites. But, in reality, there are many millions more users going to sites not part of comScore's segmentation that fall within the top three traditional newspaper "classifieds" categories -- Jobs, Cars, Real Estate.

Craigslist has become the 800-pound gorilla in online classifieds. But there are many more sites out there that are meaningful in terms of traffic and value delivered to sellers. Reaching this disaggregated market can be time consuming and challenging.

A new site and service from a company called vFlyer seeks to provide tools and distribution to create better-looking ads, using pre-designed but customizable templates and one-click distribution to a broad range of sites (including Craigslist) -- all free to sellers.

Each templated ad has a unique URL and is being optimized for SEO. So, effectively, these are microsites or landing pages for search distribution too. The business model isn't fully baked, but largely based on advertising although premium services may be offered. Postlets is a competitor.

Here's more on the company from the NY Times.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 2:40 PM | Permalink

September 6, 2006

Classifieds A Big Gainer In Local Landscape

comScore is reporting that the classifieds category is gaining very fast with 47% annual traffic growth. Classifieds sites, as defined by comScore, collectively racked up 37.4 million monthly uniques in July. That's 22% penetration of the total U.S. online population. As one might predict the category leader is Craigslist, which had 13.8 million users and experienced 99% growth vs. the previous year. Only two sites grew faster than Craigslist on a percentage basis: LiveDeal (104%) and Oodle (463%).

Posted by Greg Sterling at 4:38 AM | Permalink

August 21, 2006

comScore Figures Show First Google Decline For Nearly A Year, But What To Believe?

The latest search engine share figures from comScore are now out, and Google's nearly year-long continued rises have came to a halt in July 2006, according to comScore. But how much can you trust any of the figures that ratings services provide? In this post, I look at the latest comScore stats and begin a series about how to critically evaluate search share ratings.

I've been dealing with search ratings for 10 years now. I've seen all types of things in that time. I've watched as ratings services would suddenly pull their publicly reported information, only to resume it when a competitor came along. I've watched things like AltaVista get classified as a portal rather than a search engine or important subdomains of a particular search engine not get counted. I've been bemused at how a search engine will heartily endorse figures from a ratings service when they are positive then tell investors not to trust the figures when they go against them.

My best overall advice to anyone looking at these figures is:

Look for long-term trends. You want to view stats for several months in a row, not two isolated months compared to each other. Stats can and will plunge from one month to the next for all types of reasons, not the least due to a ratings service itself having some counting glitch. Similarly, comparing back from one month to the same time the previous year might not reflect counting changes that may have happened or been refined over that time. I want a trend line -- and a long one.
Look at figures from multiple services. For several months, comScore has painted a pretty bleak figure for Yahoo, showing share decreases. At least twice this year (January & July), Yahoo has had to warn analysts not to trust the comScore figures too much (and oh the irony of Yahoo now having hired the former comScore CEO this month). In contrast, NetRatings was showing Yahoo as pretty stable. If I'm going to declare Yahoo in trouble (and I didn't), I'm more likely to do that if more than one ratings service is reflecting a plunge of some time. If it's only one of them, then I'm more in "watch and see" mode.

Now let's jump into today's figures out of comScore, which are for share of all searches within the United States:

July 2006

Searches (Millions)

Searches Per Day (Millions)

Google

43.7%

2,753

91.8

Yahoo

28.8%

1,814

60.5

MSN

12.8%

806

26.9

AOL

5.9%

372

12.4

Ask

5.4%

340

11.3

Others

3.4%

214

7.1

NOTE: My figures for searches will vary slightly from comScore's as I'm working off the overall rounded 6.3 billion searches figure they provide multiplied by share percentages. I have to do that to calculate the share of "others" searches, which comScore does not provide. The comScore press release has precise figures.

Google's still shown as well above the rest. But the press release headline from comScore highlights a Yahoo victory:

Yahoo! Sites Register a Moderate Share Gain for the Second Consecutive Month

Indeed, some good news for Yahoo out of comScore for once. They have a gain that seems to come off of Google's loss.

Let's look at a big trend chart, then we'll do a drill down. Pulling the chart from my now updated comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings page, we get this:

Who Gained & Lost In June & July

You can see how comScore's shown Yahoo having slight drops, then a bigger drop in January, then rises in June and July. In particular, if you go back to May 2006, Yahoo had a 28 percent share. In June, it rose to 28.5 percent. In July, a further rise to 28.8 percent.

What's fueling that gain? Maybe Yahoo Answers being popular and getting heavy promotion? Maybe something else? The answer is, we don't really know. But we can try to see who is losing.

Is Google the loser? Not in June. When Yahoo saw a gain in June, so did Google. Google went up from 44.2 percent in May to 44.7 percent. in June In contrast, MSN dropped from 13.1 percent to 12.8 percent and Ask dropped from 5.3 percent to 5.1 percent. Those drops fueled some of the gains for both Yahoo and Google.

AOL is the mystery player. comScore gave no figure for May 2006. Actually, it did -- 6.7 percent. But the following month, it clawed back that figure, saying:

Due to a definitional change occurring with June 2006 data, trended data for the Time-Warner Network are not available

Since we don't have a May 2006 figure, we can't tell if the June 2006 figure for AOL -- 5.6 percent -- was a gain from or loss to Google and Yahoo.

I've been through this type of thing before. Usually, it means that methodology has changed so much that the ratings service doesn't feel comfortable comparing figures under a new system to the old one. This note is unusual in that it's particular to AOL, rather than the methodology over all. It's also disturbing, because it suggests that all those months of AOL figures previously reported perhaps can't be trusted.

I'm asking comScore about this and will update. But let's move ahead to July. Again, the goal is to figure out who lost to Yahoo's gain. In July, it really was Google, mostly. Google dropped a full percentage point, 44.7 percent in June to 43.7 percent in July. Yahoo got some of that, a 0.3 percent rise to 28.8 percent. AOL got a 0.3 percent rise as well, coming up to 5.9 percent. The Ask network of sites also came up 0.3 percent, to 5.4 percent. MSN didn't budge.

Crisis for Google? Way, way too early to be saying stuff like that. As I said, I want to see several months of trending data from a particular player before I start issuing panic calls. For all I know, next month comScore will quietly reissue these figures that shows Google doing better.

Revising Data After The Fact

For instance, let's go back to May 2006. Did you know that a month after comScore released figures, they revised those? There was no big press release about it. It was an asterisk mention as part of the June 2006 figures.

What was different? Let's compare:

Company

Original

Revised

Difference

Google

44.1%

44.2%

0.1%

Yahoo

27.9%

28.0%

0.1%

MSN

12.9%

13.1%

0.2%

AOL

6.7%

n/a

???

Ask

5.3%

0.0%

MySpace

0.7%

n/a

???

Others

2.4%

9.4%

7.0%

Aside from AOL, there was no really big change among the players. But then again, this revision suddenly changed MSN from a fifth month in a row of either decreases or no gain to the different story of the first gain in five months.

MySpace The Search Monster?

Also notice how MySpace disappears off the chart, in the revised figures. What happened? Why did comScore stop reporting figures there? I'm checking on that as well, but my guess is that close attention to the MySpace figures may have backfired on comScore.

Let's go back to April 2006. That's the first time that out of the blue, we get search figures for MySpace. comScore told us:

MySpace.com has been added to the search engine rankings for April 2006, coming in at 6th place with 43 million search queries performed (0.6 percent share of the U.S. search market). Will this smaller player eventually be able to grab a substantial share of the search market due to the site's remarkable popularity?

That's press release bait, OK? That's a nugget you're putting out in hopes that the press will eat it up. And they do, eventually. For example, in MySpace, The 27.4 Billion Pound Gorilla over at TechCrunch, the article notes at the end:

MySpace also has the sixth largest market share among search engines, even though they aren’t, actually, a search engine.

I'll get to another more important press reference in a moment, but let me diverge on the "MySpace As Search Engine" idea. What's comScore counting as searches? From the May 2006 release:

qSearch includes Web searches originating from the search engines reported, other Web-based searches such as News and Image searches and channel searches conducted on portal sites (e.g., Finance and Movies). qSearch does not include Yellow Pages or Maps searches.

OK, people on MySpace searching for other MySpacers might be doing what's considered a "channel search." But that activity is extremely unlikely to translate into a search behavior that sends people to an external site or to an ad. It's simply a site search within MySpace. If that's the traffic being counted, then searches at a place like Microsoft for software support might warrant it a place on the list (and FYI, these exact types of searches have indeed gotten Microsoft mistakenly on these types of "popular search engines" lists in the past).

MySpace does allow people to search the web. Perhaps the searches counted really are only web searches (and I'm checking on this). If so, I'm still surprise to see the sudden emergence.

Why? Because of that 2.4 percent of traffic going to "others" in May 2006. Who are these others? Among them will be players like Infospace or Earthlink. For June 2006, I have NetRatings figures giving Dogpile (an Infospace property) a 0.5 percent share. That's NetRatings, not comScore, and for a different month as well. Still, it's really unusual for a new player like MySpace to just leap out of the blue like this over a more established lower tier player. When I've seen this in the past, it's simply been because suddenly, a metrics company has changed a definition and decided to count some new player that they previously ignored.

Back to MySpace. Last month, BusinessWeek cut loose with a big article about who it was seeking a search suitor, since it was such a big search powerhouse:

MySpace already drives a huge amount of traffic to search engines. It generates 100 million searches a month. In fact, 5% of all searches on the Web and 8% of all searches on Google are originated by people who come directly from MySpace.

Wow, pretty stunning numbers. And figures that frankly, I didn't believe. As I wrote in my review:

The story also gives new, amazing stats that MySpace generates 5 percent of all searches on the web. Hmm. Just a month ago, this was said to be 0.6% of all searches in the US, according to comScore. And 8 percent of all searches on Google come via MySpace? I'm checking with the BusinessWeek author, because those stats just don't make sense.

I did email the reporter, but I never heard back. Perhaps the email went astray (I mean that in all seriousness -- email does get lost or stuck in spam filters). But five percent of all searches on the web -- eight percent of all Google searches -- those are incredible numbers, if true. But they seem so untrue when you look at the 100 million figures per month stat that BusinessWeek also gives us.

The Ask network -- with a 5 percent share of just US searches -- generates 340 million searchers per month according to comScore (see the chart above). If MySpace really had 5 percent of ALL SEARCHES WEB-WIDE, then it should have far, far more than 300 million searches per month, much less 100 million.

I don't know that the BusinessWeek story came off comScore's press release bait. Heck, the stats aren't sourced at all. But when the figures start to fly and don't make sense, that's a good time for a ratings service to stop releasing them. The BusinessWeek figures weren't adding up, and perhaps that's one reason why comScore decided that MySpace no longer deserved the limelight. After listing it as a top search engine for April and May, from June onward, it fell back into the unitemized "Other" category.

I really like BusinessWeek, by the way, but this is the second time recently that I've also seen them do stumbles with figures. Many people couldn't believe the Valley Boys write-up where BusinessWeek gave Digg a $60 million valuation. Hey, I couldn't get past this section:

Digg's stature changed dramatically that day. It is now the 24th-most popular Web site in the U.S., nipping at the New York Times' (No. 19) and easily beating Fox News (No. 62), according to industry tracker Alexa.com.

Alexa? Alexa! BusinessWeek is going to use Alexa to tell us how popular a site is? Alexa, the toolbar that so many say is so easily manipulated? Honestly, I couldn't' believe it. In this story, I'm poking at comScore -- and later this week, I'll poke at Hitwise and NetRatings. But I won't even waste my time on looking at Alexa's data, since I long ago wrote it off as being useful. But if you don't believe me, check out Matt Cutts and his A Word About Metrics, Part II post. Why, if Digg can be so popular, so can Matt. He's almost as popular as Ask. Shortly, Barry Diller will be looking to acquire him.

MySpace The Google Enabler?

comScore's not the only one to play the MySpace press release bait game. Hitwise has been having fun with it, as well. Note what Om Malik wrote about why Google felt it had to partner with MySpace:

According to data collected by Hitwise, an Internet traffic tracking service, nearly 10.8% of Google’s traffic was coming from MySpace.com for the week ending July 29, 2006. Had Fox gone with Yahoo or Microsoft, it could have been a serious blow to Google.

Now let's step back a minute. MySpace has shot up in traffic over time, but until recently, I never heard any connection suggesting that Google was somehow gaining because of that popularity. Google was popular because it was Google and generated its own weather. Now, suddenly, Google might potentially lose 10 percent of its traffic to its site?

That's especially amazing to digest, considering that Google had no search partnership with MySpace at the time. The web search box at MySpace was (and still is for the moment, despite the Google-MySpace deal) powered by Yahoo. If anyone would lose this "massive" amount of traffic, it should be Yahoo. And since Yahoo clearly didn't fight tooth and nail for MySpace, I don't think that search box was generating much.

So how's Google getting all this supposed traffic from MySpace. I don't know -- and Hitwise doesn't seem to know, either. Let's go to the Hitwise post on MySpace traffic: MySpace and Google: What do the Numbers Say?:

In January of this year, Google received a little over 4% of their traffic from MySpace in our U.S. sample. As of the week ending July 29th, that percentage has grown to almost 11%, making MySpace the #1 upstream site for Google.

Since over the last year there has been no formal relationship between the two companies, this high volume of traffic flowing from MySpace to Google would most likely be the result of users using their Google toolbar or manually navigating to Google while engaged in their MySpace session. It would seem that this represents a great opportunity for Google to monetize a portion of that audience through AdSense listings and increase search traffic through greater exposure on MySpace.

To be clear, all Hitwise knows is that for the ISP data is monitors, it sees that a bunch of people who leave MySpace go to Google next. It doesn't know why but can only guess that people for some reason decide to go to Google after MySpace.

If those people change their minds, would that hurt Google? Maybe -- but then again, it's not 10 percent of ALL Google's traffic, as Om wrote. It's 10 percent of the US audience. Google's not given out country-by-country breakdowns that I've seen for some time, but in the past, they'd stressed that half their traffic came from outside the US. So that would reduce the blow. What reduces the blow even further is the fact that if people are doing this out of habit, they aren't likely to break that habit regardless of who ultimately got the MySpace deal.

Poking At The Other Metrics Services

Enough of MySpace -- let's get back to the Google death plunge. One of the other things I said to look at was how the other ratings services are viewing them. For now, I'm going to give you the highlights of what Hitwise had to say about July 2006:

As you can see, the top engines combined account for over 94% of all search volume in the US. Since we last released these numbers in June 2006, Google (www.google.com) has increased its share from 59.3% to 60.2%, Yahoo! Search (search.yahoo.com) has increased from 22.0% to 22.5% and MSN Search (search.msn.com) has decreased slightly from 12.1% to 11.8%.

As you can see, Hitwise is finding that all is good with Google plus supporting the Yahoo gain that comScore also sees. So is Google in trouble? I'd say it's way, way too early to predict anything like that.

Tomorrow, I'll take a closer look at Hitwise, poke some fingers into the service and do some trending data. On Wednesday, I'll spend time with NetRatings. Then hopefully on Thursday, I'm going to drag out my special patented three-on-one ratings chart that I haven't used since the days of NetRatings, comScore and RelevantKnowledge to help you understand how to tap into multiple services to see the trends you might want to believe.

Postscript: I sent comScore some follow-up questions, and here's what I received back.

Q. General Comments?

We agree with your assessment that a single-month decline does not constitute a trend. In fact, comScore also observed a similar seasonal decline for Google during the same period last year. Fewer work days, more vacations, and reliance on academia could all contribute to Google’s core user group showing lower online activity and conducting fewer searches during this time period. Bottom line – Google could be more impacted by seasonality than other engines.

Q. What happened to AOL figures in May? Am I correct that you changed your methodology and so earlier figures are no longer comparable to recent ones. If so, what exactly changed?

In June, there was a dictionary change for AOL that contributed to some of the M/M decline in Time Warner searches in the US (the dictionary defines how the Time Warner property breaks out its sites into titles, channels and sub-channels). This change does not materially alter the year-over-year market share decline that Time Warner has experienced (down nearly 3 full share points from May 05 to May 06, the last full month before the dictionary change).

Q. What happened to MySpace? You started reporting it in April 2006 out of the blue, then by June, you stopped. Was MySpace traffic being counted before April 2006, or is that the first month you looked at searches there and counted them into the searches pie? Why did they stop being broken out in June? And were they really generating more searches than someone like the Infospace network? Finally, what searches are being counted -- even those internal to MySpace to find MySpacers?

MySpace is still included in qSearch market data, we’ve simply chosen not to report it on our monthly market share press releases. We typically issue market share data to the press for the top 5 search sites, and simply added MySpace for a couple of months to highlight to the market that we now have the site under measurement for Web search activity. In fact, comScore data show MySpace search activity trending very nicely over the last few months.

To clarify the specifics of our MySpace reporting, we provide data for Web search only; searches done on MySpace content (e.g., user profiles, video) are not include in the MySpace totals reported in qSearch.

Q. I notice you aren't counting yellow pages or maps searches. But Google considers any local search to be part of Google Maps. Does that mean all this traffic is getting omitted now?

We do not include map-only searches in qSearch or any of our other search tracking services. There is the initial question of whether a map request actually constitutes a search, but ultimately, low marketplace demand is the primary reason for our not reporting map searches. We have, instead, chosen to concentrate our efforts and resources in the areas of greatest importance to our major search clients (i.e., all of the major search engines).

However, maps that are accompanied by business listings (as you would find in Google Maps, if you searched for a business name category) are included in comScore’s Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) Search Share report. This report includes the leading IYP sites like SUperpages.com, plus the YP/business list search activity taking place on the portals. In other words, if the result is just a map, then comScore does not report that activity in any of its search reports; if the map includes or is part of Yellow Page listings, that activity is reported in our IYP Search Share report.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:16 AM | Permalink

August 8, 2006

Yahoo News Gains Search Engine News Market Share

comScore released a report showing Yahoo News has "31.2 million unique visitors" with 33 percent of all news traffic. Followed by Yahoo is MSNBC with 23.4 million or 25% share, then AOL News with 20.4 million unique visitors or 22% share. These numbers are based on June 2006 data.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:16 AM | Permalink

May 26, 2006

NetRatings: Google Tops 50 Percent Mark In US Web Searches

New stats (PDF) out from NetRatings show Google now handles half the web searches in the United States:

Search Engine April 2005 April 2006 Google 47% 50% Yahoo 22% 22% MSN 12% 11%

Need a longer view? See our NetRatings page for stats over time. I'll be getting the missing months posted soon, promise. I'm also planning a side-by-side against comScore figures. The latest of those released earlier this week show Google with a smaller chunk of the search pie but still higher than others. Here's a fast side-by-side:

April 2006 comScore NetRatings Google 43% 50% Yahoo 28% 22% MSN 13% 11%

Historical comScore figures are on our comScore page, fresh through March 2006.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:07 AM | Permalink

NetRatings: Google Tops 50 Percent Mark In US Web Searches

New stats (PDF) out from NetRatings show Google now handles half the web searches in the United States:

Search Engine April 2005 April 2006 Google 47% 50% Yahoo 22% 22% MSN 12% 11%

April 2006 comScore NetRatings Google 43% 50% Yahoo 28% 22% MSN 13% 11%

Historical comScore figures are on our comScore page, fresh through March 2006.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:07 AM | Permalink

NetRatings: Google Tops 50 Percent Mark In US Web Searches

New stats (PDF) out from NetRatings show Google now handles half the web searches in the United States:

Search Engine April 2005 April 2006 Google 47% 50% Yahoo 22% 22% MSN 12% 11%

April 2006 comScore NetRatings Google 43% 50% Yahoo 28% 22% MSN 13% 11%

Historical comScore figures are on our comScore page, fresh through March 2006.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:07 AM | Permalink

NetRatings: Google Tops 50 Percent Mark In US Web Searches

New stats (PDF) out from NetRatings show Google now handles half the web searches in the United States:

Search Engine April 2005 April 2006 Google 47% 50% Yahoo 22% 22% MSN 12% 11%

April 2006 comScore NetRatings Google 43% 50% Yahoo 28% 22% MSN 13% 11%

Historical comScore figures are on our comScore page, fresh through March 2006.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:07 AM | Permalink

May 22, 2006

Google Continues To Gain Market Share While Others Lose

comScore released their latest stats on the "Share of Online Searches by Engine". Google gained April 2005 to April 2006 6.6 percentage points, claiming 43.1%, up from 42.7% March 2006. Yahoo with 28.0% in April 2006, dropped 2.7 percentage points from April 2005, but remained flat from March 2006 to April 2006 with 28% share. MSN dropped 3.2 percentage points claiming 12.9%, and also saw a decline from March 2006 to April 2006 by .3%. What is a bit surprising is that Ask.com's share also decreased both from April 2005 with 6.1% to March 2006 with 5.9% and then in April 2006 declining once again by .1% to 5.8% market share.

Ask.com has been doing a blitz of TV commercials, which should have increased their share from Mach to April. Maybe the newer campaigns will have a bigger impact? I will ask Danny Sullivan to possibly dig deeper into these numbers, later in the week.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 2:30 PM | Permalink

Google Continues To Gain Market Share While Others Lose

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 2:30 PM | Permalink

Google Continues To Gain Market Share While Others Lose

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 2:30 PM | Permalink

Google Continues To Gain Market Share While Others Lose

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 2:30 PM | Permalink

April 25, 2006

Yahoo's Ad Inventory Beats Out Google

Susan Kuchinskas informed me of this post that shows recent comScore qSearch stats where Yahoo's ad inventory is higher as a percentage, when compared to Google. Yahoo shows a PPC ad for 59.7 percent of Web searches conducted. Google shows a PPC ad for 52.9 percent of Web searches. Google still has a higher click through rate with 11.8 percent but Yahoo is not far behind with 11.4 percent. Keep in mind, I know Danny hates comparing month to month, and these numbers are comparing March 2006 vs. March 2005.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:14 AM | Permalink

Yahoo's Ad Inventory Beats Out Google

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:14 AM | Permalink

Yahoo's Ad Inventory Beats Out Google

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:14 AM | Permalink

Yahoo's Ad Inventory Beats Out Google

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:14 AM | Permalink

April 19, 2006

Revenues Up, Profits Down But Yahoo Meets Earnings Expectations

Yahoo reported a 22 percent drop in first quarter profits but met the expected earnings forecast. Yahoo profit slumps 22% in quarter from the New York Times has more details on yesterday's earnings call. Search and branding advertising revenue (sadly, they get lumped together) rose 35 percent.

Yahoo also said it had a 15 to 20 percent gain in search queries in the quarter, to counter stats from comScore showing Yahoo is losing share. There's some spin here I'll explore more later this week, when I do my stats review.

The short answer is this. Query growth is up across the board, comScore says. So sure, Yahoo will have a gain in NUMBER of queries. But the share of overall queries, according to comScore, has dropped. If that share had stayed steady, then query growth would have been even more.

Note that in a fast look I did at the latest NetRatings figures (older ones here), Yahoo's actually still looking pretty steady even in recent months. Again, I'll have more on that soon.

Some other coverage:

Yahoo profit slides 22% Stock climbs 6% after Net company declares optimism: San Francisco Chronicle
Yahoo results meet expectations, ads seen solid: Reuters
1st-quarter revenue up 34% at Yahoo, but profit falls 22%: San Jose Mercury News
Yahoo profit drops, matches forecasts: MarketWatch
Yahoo! Makes Numbers, Reveals Search, Streaming Plans: ClickZ

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:21 AM | Permalink

Revenues Up, Profits Down But Yahoo Meets Earnings Expectations

Note that in a fast look I did at the latest NetRatings figures (older ones here), Yahoo's actually still looking pretty steady even in recent months. Again, I'll have more on that soon.

Some other coverage:

Yahoo profit slides 22% Stock climbs 6% after Net company declares optimism: San Francisco Chronicle
Yahoo results meet expectations, ads seen solid: Reuters
1st-quarter revenue up 34% at Yahoo, but profit falls 22%: San Jose Mercury News
Yahoo profit drops, matches forecasts: MarketWatch
Yahoo! Makes Numbers, Reveals Search, Streaming Plans: ClickZ

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:21 AM | Permalink

Revenues Up, Profits Down But Yahoo Meets Earnings Expectations

Note that in a fast look I did at the latest NetRatings figures (older ones here), Yahoo's actually still looking pretty steady even in recent months. Again, I'll have more on that soon.

Some other coverage:

Yahoo profit slides 22% Stock climbs 6% after Net company declares optimism: San Francisco Chronicle
Yahoo results meet expectations, ads seen solid: Reuters
1st-quarter revenue up 34% at Yahoo, but profit falls 22%: San Jose Mercury News
Yahoo profit drops, matches forecasts: MarketWatch
Yahoo! Makes Numbers, Reveals Search, Streaming Plans: ClickZ

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:21 AM | Permalink

Revenues Up, Profits Down But Yahoo Meets Earnings Expectations

Note that in a fast look I did at the latest NetRatings figures (older ones here), Yahoo's actually still looking pretty steady even in recent months. Again, I'll have more on that soon.

Some other coverage:

Yahoo profit slides 22% Stock climbs 6% after Net company declares optimism: San Francisco Chronicle
Yahoo results meet expectations, ads seen solid: Reuters
1st-quarter revenue up 34% at Yahoo, but profit falls 22%: San Jose Mercury News
Yahoo profit drops, matches forecasts: MarketWatch
Yahoo! Makes Numbers, Reveals Search, Streaming Plans: ClickZ

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:21 AM | Permalink

April 18, 2006

comScore: Google Leads On March 2006 US Search Share

You may have seen some rumblings a couple of weeks ago about Google being up in search traffic compared to competitors, based on comScore figures. I'm going to do a big drill down on that later this week, bringing in some NetRatings and Hitwise figures as well. But more comScore figures have just arrived for March, so here they are:

Share of Online Searches US Home, Work & University Users

Search Network March 2005 March 2006 Change Google 36.4% 42.7% +6.3% Yahoo 30.6% 28.0% -2.6% MSN/Microsoft 16.5% 13.2% -3.3% AOL/Time Warner 8.9% 7.6% -1.4% Ask 5.5% 5.9% +0.4%

Other notes from the comScore release:

Americans conducted 6.4 billion searches online in March, up 10 percent from last month and 15 percent from last year. The increase in search queries from the previous month marked the largest gain over the past twelve months.
Google Sites led the pack with 2.7 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.8 billion), MSN-Microsoft (849 million), Time-Warner Network (486 million), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (376 million).
The toolbar search market continues to be dominated by Google and Yahoo!, which combined for more than 95 percent of toolbar searches in March. Google led the way with 48.9 percent, while Yahoo! captured 46.5 percent.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:31 AM | Permalink

comScore: Google Leads On March 2006 US Search Share

Share of Online Searches US Home, Work & University Users

Search Network March 2005 March 2006 Change Google 36.4% 42.7% +6.3% Yahoo 30.6% 28.0% -2.6% MSN/Microsoft 16.5% 13.2% -3.3% AOL/Time Warner 8.9% 7.6% -1.4% Ask 5.5% 5.9% +0.4%

Other notes from the comScore release:

Americans conducted 6.4 billion searches online in March, up 10 percent from last month and 15 percent from last year. The increase in search queries from the previous month marked the largest gain over the past twelve months.
Google Sites led the pack with 2.7 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.8 billion), MSN-Microsoft (849 million), Time-Warner Network (486 million), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (376 million).
The toolbar search market continues to be dominated by Google and Yahoo!, which combined for more than 95 percent of toolbar searches in March. Google led the way with 48.9 percent, while Yahoo! captured 46.5 percent.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:31 AM | Permalink

comScore: Google Leads On March 2006 US Search Share

Share of Online Searches US Home, Work & University Users

Search Network March 2005 March 2006 Change Google 36.4% 42.7% +6.3% Yahoo 30.6% 28.0% -2.6% MSN/Microsoft 16.5% 13.2% -3.3% AOL/Time Warner 8.9% 7.6% -1.4% Ask 5.5% 5.9% +0.4%

Other notes from the comScore release:

Americans conducted 6.4 billion searches online in March, up 10 percent from last month and 15 percent from last year. The increase in search queries from the previous month marked the largest gain over the past twelve months.
Google Sites led the pack with 2.7 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.8 billion), MSN-Microsoft (849 million), Time-Warner Network (486 million), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (376 million).
The toolbar search market continues to be dominated by Google and Yahoo!, which combined for more than 95 percent of toolbar searches in March. Google led the way with 48.9 percent, while Yahoo! captured 46.5 percent.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:31 AM | Permalink

comScore: Google Leads On March 2006 US Search Share

Share of Online Searches US Home, Work & University Users

Search Network March 2005 March 2006 Change Google 36.4% 42.7% +6.3% Yahoo 30.6% 28.0% -2.6% MSN/Microsoft 16.5% 13.2% -3.3% AOL/Time Warner 8.9% 7.6% -1.4% Ask 5.5% 5.9% +0.4%

Other notes from the comScore release:

Americans conducted 6.4 billion searches online in March, up 10 percent from last month and 15 percent from last year. The increase in search queries from the previous month marked the largest gain over the past twelve months.
Google Sites led the pack with 2.7 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.8 billion), MSN-Microsoft (849 million), Time-Warner Network (486 million), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (376 million).
The toolbar search market continues to be dominated by Google and Yahoo!, which combined for more than 95 percent of toolbar searches in March. Google led the way with 48.9 percent, while Yahoo! captured 46.5 percent.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:31 AM | Permalink

November 20, 2005

Search Overtaking Email as Most Popular Online Activity

New research from Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and consumer behavior trends from the comScore Media Metrix consumer panel show that about 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day. This is a big jump from last year, from 30% to 41% of the internet-using population searching every day. If these trends continue, the use of search engines may well overtake email as the primary internet activity in our daily online lives.

I plan to take a closer look at the report later in the week; if you can wait, a summary and link to the full PDF report are available on this page.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:17 PM | Permalink

Search Overtaking Email as Most Popular Online Activity

I plan to take a closer look at the report later in the week; if you can wait, a summary and link to the full PDF report are available on this page.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 6:17 PM | Permalink

Search Overtaking Email as Most Popular Online Activity

I plan to take a closer look at the report later in the week; if you can wait, a summary and link to the full PDF report are available on this page.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 6:17 PM | Permalink

Search Overtaking Email as Most Popular Online Activity

I plan to take a closer look at the report later in the week; if you can wait, a summary and link to the full PDF report are available on this page.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 6:17 PM | Permalink

November 8, 2005

Why We Use Various Search Engines

InternetRetailer has done some nice charts off of a Majestic Research/comScore report looking at why we use particular search engines (for Google, it's the results; for others, it's because you're doing other things). The stats also look at awareness of paid links and tolerance of demographic and behavior targeting. Here's a summary:

For the question of why people use particular search engines, top reasons for each major service were:

Google: 68 percent say it's because it has the best results.
AOL: 65 percent say it's because they are doing other things at AOL, like checking mail and other non-search activities.
MSN: 63 percent say it's just like AOL, because they are doing other things there.
Yahoo: 52 percent say it's just like AOL, because they are doing other things there. Yahoo got the second highest marks for having the best results after Google, with 33 percent choosing that reason.

The report found that AOL and Google users were the most likely to notice sponsored links (82 and 81 percent, respectively) while MSN users were the least likely to notice them (69 percent).

As for privacy, 58 percent said they weren't worried about being demographically or behaviorally targeted as long as it was disclosed and they could opt out. And 27 percent said they'd keep using a search engine even if they couldn't opt out.

Haven't tracked down the actual report yet; will postscript, if I can find it.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:11 PM | Permalink

Why We Use Various Search Engines

For the question of why people use particular search engines, top reasons for each major service were:

Google: 68 percent say it's because it has the best results.
AOL: 65 percent say it's because they are doing other things at AOL, like checking mail and other non-search activities.
MSN: 63 percent say it's just like AOL, because they are doing other things there.
Yahoo: 52 percent say it's just like AOL, because they are doing other things there. Yahoo got the second highest marks for having the best results after Google, with 33 percent choosing that reason.

The report found that AOL and Google users were the most likely to notice sponsored links (82 and 81 percent, respectively) while MSN users were the least likely to notice them (69 percent).

Haven't tracked down the actual report yet; will postscript, if I can find it.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 1:11 PM | Permalink

Why We Use Various Search Engines

For the question of why people use particular search engines, top reasons for each major service were:

Google: 68 percent say it's because it has the best results.
AOL: 65 percent say it's because they are doing other things at AOL, like checking mail and other non-search activities.
MSN: 63 percent say it's just like AOL, because they are doing other things there.
Yahoo: 52 percent say it's just like AOL, because they are doing other things there. Yahoo got the second highest marks for having the best results after Google, with 33 percent choosing that reason.

The report found that AOL and Google users were the most likely to notice sponsored links (82 and 81 percent, respectively) while MSN users were the least likely to notice them (69 percent).

Haven't tracked down the actual report yet; will postscript, if I can find it.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 1:11 PM | Permalink

Why We Use Various Search Engines

For the question of why people use particular search engines, top reasons for each major service were:

Google: 68 percent say it's because it has the best results.
AOL: 65 percent say it's because they are doing other things at AOL, like checking mail and other non-search activities.
MSN: 63 percent say it's just like AOL, because they are doing other things there.
Yahoo: 52 percent say it's just like AOL, because they are doing other things there. Yahoo got the second highest marks for having the best results after Google, with 33 percent choosing that reason.

The report found that AOL and Google users were the most likely to notice sponsored links (82 and 81 percent, respectively) while MSN users were the least likely to notice them (69 percent).

Haven't tracked down the actual report yet; will postscript, if I can find it.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 1:11 PM | Permalink

August 23, 2005

Google Top Search Engine In July 2005; Toolbar-Based Queries Grow & Yahoo Tops There

I've posted the latest comScore search engine ratings for July 2005 on our comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings page. As is usual, Google is the top ranked search engine in the US, based on the share of those searching at the site for the US. Google came in with a 36.5 percent share, followed by Yahoo at 30.5, then MSN at 15.5. Full details on our other page.

That page also looks at how things have changed over the past few months. AOL and Ask Jeeves have both shown some interesting growth patterns.

comScore also released some limited stats about search toolbars driving queries:

In July 2005, 11 percent of all US searches were done using toolbars, up from 8 percent the year before.
Yahoo had the most popular toolbar, handling 51 percent of all toolbar-based search queries.
Yahoo processed 282 million queries via the toolbar last month

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:52 AM | Permalink

Google Top Search Engine In July 2005; Toolbar-Based Queries Grow & Yahoo Tops There

That page also looks at how things have changed over the past few months. AOL and Ask Jeeves have both shown some interesting growth patterns.

comScore also released some limited stats about search toolbars driving queries:

In July 2005, 11 percent of all US searches were done using toolbars, up from 8 percent the year before.
Yahoo had the most popular toolbar, handling 51 percent of all toolbar-based search queries.
Yahoo processed 282 million queries via the toolbar last month

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:52 AM | Permalink

Google Top Search Engine In July 2005; Toolbar-Based Queries Grow & Yahoo Tops There

That page also looks at how things have changed ov