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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 …

All in all, it’s kind of ingenious.

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).

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.

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.

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?

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.