Just got an email from an UBS analyst with an overview of search share data from Comscore for Sept. Summary:
Google increases Month/Month search share
Comscore’s September US search data suggests Google took some share lost over the last few months, which gives us confidence in our Q3 paid click growth ests. (12% Y/Y worldwide). Bing’s share of US search also increased, though share gains were lower than previous months as September is typically a relatively weaker month for travel, a vertical in which Microsoft has tried to differentiate itself.
Google and Microsoft took share at Yahoo!’s expense
Google’s share of US core searches in Sep was up 27 bps M/M to 64.9%, almost reaching levels prior to the launch of Bing. Bing had 9.4% of US search share (+18bps M/M) while AOL and Ask were roughly flat M/M at 3% and 3.9% respectively. Yahoo! lost 50bps M/M, resulting in 18.8% share of core US searches.
Google and Microsoft’s Y/Y query growth still strong in September
Bing’s Sep. Y/Y search volume growth was +31% Y/Y from 32% Y/Y in Aug, while Google’s search volume grew 21% Y/Y, roughly flat from 22% Y/Y growth in Aug. Yahoo!’s search volume grew 9% Y/Y from 17% Y/Y growth in Aug.
This is just more useless analysis that fails to recognize the fact that the only appropriate way to measure search market share is to gauge how many visitors the search engines actually send to other sites.
Google inflates its page views (which is all these reports measure) by leveraging its own network. They don’t actually get that many more “searchers” than the other major search engines.
Yahoo is going down,especial when Bing is out there.