Search fight continues, but Google holds serve
When comScore released its latest search market share statistics last week, the easy headline was that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) now owned 30 percent of the market. However, the search market isn't that simple and you have to dig a bit deeper to find the real story.
The way one arrives at that 30 percent figure is by adding up Microsoft's 13.4 score with Yahoo!'s 17.9. Microsoft is getting credit for Yahoo! in this instance because Bing is running on the back-end of Yahoo! searches. Fair enough, I guess, but it's also worth noting that Yahoo! has been losing ground for some time now and when you dig into the Total Core Search Report numbers, Yahoo! lost .6 and Microsoft gained the same .6, which would suggest that Microsoft is siphoning market share from its partner instead of its competitor, which I'm guessing isn't what Microsoft was hoping for here.
Meanwhile using that same Total Score Search measurement, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) gained 0.3 in the period, meaning that Microsoft didn't really gain anything here, and in fact lost a bit of ground. You can judge the numbers for yourself:
* Source comScore qSearch
comScore Total Core Search Share Report*
February 2011 vs. January 2011
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity
Total Core Search Share (%)
Jan-11
Feb-11
Point Change
Total Core Search
100.0%
100.0%
N/A
Google Sites
64.6%
64.9%
0.3
Yahoo! Sites
17.9%
17.3%
-0.6
Microsoft Sites
12.8%
13.4%
0.6
Ask Network
3.1%
2.9%
-0.2
AOL, Inc.
1.6%
1.6%
0.0
While other numbers in the market review showed the month was down in general, according to comScore this particular metric measures "Total Core Search" is based on the five major search engines, including partner searches, cross-channel searches and contextual searches. Searches for mapping, local directory and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in these numbers."
Overall, it seems on its face at least, that Microsoft didn't make any major gains here, and the ones it did make appear to have come primarily at the expense of its partner. Microsoft might want to trumpet these numbers as proof that Bing is gaining ground, but it doesn't appear to be making any significant gains over its real rival, Google.
For more information:
- see the comScore press release
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