Yahoo! and Microsoft displayed robust growth in the search market in May, but both may have gained through somewhat misleading innovation, according to comScore.
Google finished May with 63.7 percent of the U.S. search market, down. 0.7 percentage points from 64.4 percent in April.
Yahoo! finished the month with 18.3 percent of the market, up 0.6 points from 17.7 percent in April.
Meanwhile, Microsoft saw its share of the search market grow to 12.1 percent, up 0.3 points from 11.8 percent in the previous month.
Ask Network finished May with 3.6 percent of the market, while AOL LLC finished with 2.3 percent. Both search entities saw their shares decline 0.1 percentage points respectively.
The day before comScore announced these results, the company released a blog post titled, “Changes in the Search Landscape and How They Impact Search Measurement.” In it, comScore notes that since its last search measurement overhaul in July 2007, “we’ve seen a wave of change across the web that has changed the very nature of a web page, from an object that is requested and delivered, to one that is a live platform that can integrate content from many sources.” Search, consequently, has changed as well.
Yahoo! and Microsoft have gained in market share partly thanks to its use of “contextual search,” which comScore describes as “providing search results that are highly relevant to the content being consumed by a user.”
Though this is meant to enhance user experience, it’s hurting the value of comScore’s monthly search engine market share results. So, the company will think things over and will review how it will “classify various types of searches, count them and report them.” In its blog post, comScore says it hopes to implement these changes “ideally starting with the release of July data in the first half of August.”
In its expanded-search figures, comScore shows that Microsoft’s non-Bing sites saw a 19 percent month-over-month boost in search queries in May, while Amazon saw a 14 percent increase.
A total of 15.9 billion queries were conducted in May, up 3 percent from 15.5 billion in April, according to comScore.
Sources:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/6/comScore_Releases_May_2010_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
http://blog.comscore.com/2010/06/changes_in_search_landscape.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/comscore-says-itll-fix-search-share-measurement-now-that-yahoo-and-microsoft-are-gaming-it-2010-6
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