Are comScore’s Search Engine Stats Way Off?
Yesterday, comScore released its latest assessment of search engine market share with their Search Engine Rankings statistics. To generate their statistics, comScore uses a large sample of two million people who have agreed to let the company monitor their browsing behaviour. I would expect such a sample to be pretty representative; and yet, I have to wonder if they’re way off the mark.
comScore Search Engine Rankings have: Google at around a 50% market share; Yahoo! at around 25%; Microsoft at about 10%; and Ask at about 5%. I find those numbers pretty surprising. Almost everyone I know uses Google; and almost no-one I know uses Yahoo, or Microsoft; and the only time anyone I know mentions Ask, it’s to make a negative remark.
Now, if I look at my own access logs from June, to compare with comScore’s numbers, I get the following market share stats: Google, 94%; Yahoo, 3%; Microsoft < 1%; and everyone else is in the noise. These numbers are much more in line with search engine usage among people I know.
I wonder what the true picture is for search engine market share? If comScore’s numbers are right, and 50% of Internet users don’t use Google, where are all these people, and what kind of people are they?
Asam Bashir wrote:
Hotmail and MSN Messenger users? Clicking on the Windows Live ad service by mistake?
Posted 17 Jul 2007 at 12:43 pm ¶
Mr X wrote:
Geographic spread - for example yahoo is *much* more popular in Asia. ie most people you know are in the UK while there is a lot of variation in countries - same goes for browser share - firefox is much stronger in europe than in the states for example.
Posted 19 Jul 2007 at 8:08 am ¶
simon wrote:
Mr X - I’m not sure Geography really explains the comScore results compared to mine; the comScore results are just for the US market; and most of the people reading this blog are in the US also.
I guess it might be that the kind of people that read this blog (those with an interest in technology) tend to use Google more than the rest of the population.
Posted 19 Jul 2007 at 11:07 am ¶
Mr X wrote:
You were talking about your personal experience -
“Almost everyone I know uses Google; and almost no-one I know uses Yahoo, or Microsoft; ”
I was assuming that you had UK mostly UK centric friends!
When it comes to your own web stats - you had the advantage of knowing where your hits were coming from….:-) Have your tried splitting by search engine versus browser ( ie affected by browser default search engine? ) or country or OS?
Posted 19 Jul 2007 at 1:26 pm ¶
simon wrote:
As I said, my own stats give Google a 94% market share, so I don’t think my stats are affected by anything like browser, OS, country etc.
Thinking about this some more, I suspect the issue might be the *type* of searches that lead people to this blog. That is, the kind of searches that bring people here are searches for keywords like: Java, iPhone, software development etc. However, there are other categories of search altogether e.g. “local search” where people are looking for a completely different type of information. For those kind of searches, I think people are much more likely to use other search engines.
Posted 20 Jul 2007 at 6:32 am ¶