June Search Market Share: Big Surprise from MSN
Written by Steve Willis (contact - e-mail) -- July 9th, 2007 |
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Our readers have had several questions regarding the June Search Share, specifically MSN/Live’s increase and we have posted an update, showing the numbers without the ClubLive traffic. Check it out!
Google finally has a competitor join it in the (until now) exclusive, positive-year-over-year-growth club. MSN/Live increased their query volume by 67% from May, and 48% from a year ago. Search volume was up all across the board in June and took most everyone else in the same direction.
A good portion of the additional Live searches are coming from the Live Search Club, where you can apparently play games for points which you can redeem for fine Microsoft products. All of the games involve using Live’s search engine - to get the points, you have to search with Live. It looks like Chicktionary is leading the charge (by the way, “chicktionary”… not as cool as it sounds).
We didn’t see any traffic to club.live.com at all in April. About a third of a million unique visitors went to the club in May, and in June, this shot up to over 3 million unique visitors.
While that sharp spike from MSN looks impressive, it’s only relative to their own current standing. In terms of market share, it represents just 5 percentage points that Live took away from other engines (mostly Google). If Microsoft can actually leverage this traffic to club.live.com into actual search users and string together a few more months like this, they could really threaten Google’s top spot.
Did you like that post? You'll love these.
- June Search Market Share Update: MSN still up without ClubLive
- June Search Market Share Update: Windows Live Search Marketing Kicks In
- October Search Market Share: Query Volume Breaks 10b Mark, Windows Live Search Edges Ahead
- April Search Market Share: Yahoo! Up… A Little
- July Search Market Share: Growth Continues for MSN
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July 9th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
This seems wrong to me. Why would MSN take 4.3 points of share only from Google, but only 0.1 points from Yahoo and 0.2 points from Ask? If anything, Google users strike me as less likely to switch to Live — and certainly to Club Live — than Yahoo or Ask users. Also, search market shares usually move by tenths of percentage points per month. A move this big in one month is unprecedented. Are you sure your data are correct?
July 9th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
#1. Because Yahoo, Ask generate search from contents, Google from direct search.
July 10th, 2007 at 2:47 am
How does one independently verify that Compete, Inc. is impartial and unbiased ?
How do we know that you are not being funded by or biased towards one or more of the major search engines?
How does Compete, Inc. pay its bills?
Thanks for any response
July 10th, 2007 at 2:51 am
Cliff, you are assuming that the total search queries remained constant.
What might have happen is total search queries went up by say ~12%, of which say 4% went to live, 7% went to yahoo, 0.6% went to ask, and only 0.4% went to google. So google infact gained 0.4% more queries, possibly with no one switching. But still its % share of market declined since other players gained a larger share of the increase in queries.
July 10th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Cliff Parker asked, “A move this big in one month is unprecedented. Are you sure your data are correct?”
As a club live player, and a participant in various message boards regarding these games, I can offer my opinion that this enormous increase in traffic makes perfect sense. Each time one plays one of these club live games, it racks up dozens of search engine hits, and a game might take 5 minutes. So hundreds of hits per hour. And some of the prizes are so lucrative (for example, a $400 retail version of Windows Vista in exchange for maybe 10 hours of playing games, now that the solutions to all the puzzles have been posted in various places), people play hour after hour after hour. I know of people who have already won 10 or 20 copies of Windows Vista.
In addition, there has been significant amounts of “botting” going on, people running bots which play the games for them. A single one of these people can be generating tens of thousands of search engine hits over time.
I was expecting to see a big jump in the search engine numbers, and so I’m not surprised at all.
July 10th, 2007 at 10:13 am
To Funvin’s point, I don’t see why only Google would have had a meaningful market share change. If Club Live were really expanding the search market, Yahoo and Ask should have seen more share loss.
Also, why are we counting “searches” from Live Search Club as searches? I just played Chicktionary, and what it does is run a search every time you enter a word into the game. My guess is that at least 90% of the “searches” run by Chicktionary aren’t even viewed by the customer.
Compete, I’m still skeptical of your data. Can you explain why Live Search Club had a big impact on Google but not on Yahoo and Ask?
July 10th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Every month I have to estimate Query-To-Visitor ratios for the search engines to track real market share. It would make life more interesting (and your statistics more useful) if you guys would do it for the rest of us. Number-of-Queries per month and Number-of-visitors per month don’t tell us anything useful about the search market.
July 10th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Can we see the exact same chart but with the Live Search Club metrics removed?
July 11th, 2007 at 2:04 am
Obviously some people are feeling kind of zealous that Windows Live is taking up a slightly more higher percentage of market share. Face it, Live Search Club is popular. Just play some games, win some points, and trade it for some neat prizes on the site. That’s good marketing there.
For the most part, the results are usually relevant. For me. You could even find the answer just by looking at the results and their descriptions. It’s pretty easy. I’m not sure if it’s going to get any Google switchers, but it could. Live Search is actually pretty good in some parts if you tried it. Like Instant Answers are neat. Overall, there’s not much difference in relevancy across all search engines. It’s just the branding that gets people. I was expecting Live Search Club to drive up market share, and I guess I was right.
July 11th, 2007 at 9:37 am
It does not surprise me that the market share went from Yahoo and ask and not Google. If people haven’t given up using those search engines yet, they are probably pretty devoted to them!
July 11th, 2007 at 10:17 am
I never heard of Live Search Club before reading this article. It did prompt me to join and give Microsoft a hand at cracking Google!
July 11th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Well, the author said it right in the first few sentences. MSN/Live has increased their search traffic, and the searches mostly come from Live Search Club.
Smoke and mirrors… how can anyone look at this data and say MSN/Live has actually increased their search market share? They just added games where the page automatically queries a new word, and then they count it as a search. People are just playing games, not searching for keywords. Are you kidding me? It seems like an attempt to make it look like they’re making a run for it and create some publicity. I guess any search engine could have a program running searches for you automatically and then declare an increase in search traffic.
This data means nothing.
July 11th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Thanks to everyone for your comments - whenever another company makes headway against Google its a big deal! I thought I would answer some of the questions that came up in your comments:
Cliff asks why Google took the market share hit, while Yahoo and Ask increased (and then questioned the accuracy of our data). The mathematical answer is that total query volume across the four engines grew about 7%. Since Google query volume was largely flat from May-June, its share naturally decreased; the Yahoo and Ask query growth were independent of the Club Live phenomenon, but not enough to increase share. Club Live *helped* Microsoft grow faster than the market so it was the only engine who increased share (in a growing market). And yes our data are accurate.
Leonard E. asks if anyone can vouch that we are impartial, favorable to one engine or another and how we pay our bills. In this order: 1) our userbase (compete.com users and our vertical market clients) will vouch that our data is an unbiased representation of web traffic, and that our methodology is statistically sound. We would be out of business if they weren’t; 2) we’re not biased toward any one company; like Switzerland, our data and our findings are market neutral; 3) we pay our bills on time. Ok, seriously, we work with big marketing clients in the automotive, telcom/media, travel and financial services markets – and engines and portals; they pay our bills, but we do a great job separating search and state if you’re worried that a client relationship might sway our “investigative reporting.”
Coffee Games asks if we can show the same table with Club Live data removed. Your wish is our command. Steve Willis is posting that information today on the Compete blog. Check back early afternoon.
Let me know if there are any questions. I’ll try to answer them as clearly as possible. Keep in mind, answering math problems with prose is one of the harder challenges in life (and funvin is better than me at it).
July 11th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
@Charlie Foster: The data does mean something. It means that more people are using Live Search. Live Search might be a viable alternative to Google for some users if they try it long enough. Live Search Club isn’t meant to generate more search market-share, it was meant for people to give Live Search a try, possibly trade in points for prizes, and possibly even get real switchers to that platform.
All in all, it’s kind of ingenious.
July 16th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
This is pretty easy to understand. MS, sells 40 Million copies of Vista, this resets default search functions or most of those users, MS search share rockets. Oh gee, wow! Come on this is not hard to understand, give it a month or so it won’t last.
July 16th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Microsoft buys search share with Live Search Club
Bill Gates famously suggested that Microsoft might buy the affections of Internet searchers and that seems to have come true as market research firms Compete and comScore have both reported a substantial jump in Microsoft’s June US search share …
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October 27th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
msn live will do it to us all
April 7th, 2008 at 9:20 am
MSN should re-think their search result since still msn not deliver quality result to user with compare to google.com
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June 24th, 2008 at 5:19 am
MSN should definetly re-think their search result since they do not deliver quality result to compare with google.com
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