March Search Market Share Redux: Club Live Gets Us Again
Written by Jeremy Crane (contact - e-mail) -- April 23rd, 2008 | Recommend ThisAs March search stats were published by the other major third party measurement companies over the past few weeks I started to get a little worried about our post from a couple of weeks ago. So we decided to go a little deeper into our data and as a result we did an extensive page level look at our search counts. Low and behold, it turns out we got bitten again by the Club Live bug. You would think that after the hubbub raised over Club Live last July we would have learned our lesson. Ever since that post last July we have been filtering out Club Live generated searches. It turns out that in February, MSN launched some new Club Live games that generated a solid amount of interest and skewed our March search market share report. So here I am a couple weeks later, after umpteen blogs have reposted our numbers and any number of bloggers have contrasted our results with the other third party measurement folks. I was hoping to get this out before Danny put together this great analysis, but alas it did not happen.
The new, updated, better than ever overview …
- Google market share increased 0.6ppts on 6% m-o-m volume growth reaching a new record market share
- Yahoo! continued the slide with market share dropping another ½ point to a new record low
- Windows Live Search market share inched up slightly as volume gains moved just slightly more than the market
- Ask also moved one step ahead of the market with market share inching forward
- AOL was the only major engine to post a decline with volume off 4% m-o-m
- It’s still not easy being in the third party reporting game
*Search market share includes web search only for the Adult US Online Population and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.
Did you like that post? You'll love these.
- March Search Market Share: March Madness in the Search World
- July Search Market Share: Growth Continues for MSN
- August Search Market Share: Back to Status Quo
- October 2007 Search Market Share: Is taking shots at the big guy working for Ask?
- September Search Market Share: Back to School Lifts Search Volume
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April 23rd, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Hey, at least you tracked down what it was. I’m glad you did an update to let people know what you found out.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Help me understand this- why don’t you include the Club Live search results?
April 24th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Club Live is a collection of games you can play for points. The way many of the games work is that the page is split into two frames; the top frame is a flash based game, and the bottom frame is a search page. To play the games (Spelling Bee for example: http://club.live.com/spelling_bee.aspx) you type words into the game and when you hit enter, it automatically generates a search query in the bottom frame. For some of the games you can also use the bottom search frame for research to help answer the questions.
This generates tons of searches for [define few] [define woe] [define row]… and on and on (play Spelling Bee and you’ll see what I mean).
April 26th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Steven- thanks for the explanation. Makes sense to me.
April 28th, 2008 at 1:44 am
Google continues to dominate the search engine world…..at the rate things are going, they will have 80% of the search market in just 12 more months.
And, it appears that Yahoo is the one that has the most to lose.
your article shows that MSN is flailing away, using stupid games to boost their search traffic.
Even if Yahoo & MSN are merged, they will (combined) have less than 1 out of 5 searches on the Internet……pretty dismal!!!
May 6th, 2008 at 12:55 am
Part of the reason that Google is so popular isn’t just that it gives good results, it’s because it has so many links to it. Firefox defaults to Google as their search engine. Millions of people have those ubiquitously annoying “Ads by Google” on their webpages. People use Google because their friends use Google. Google has links via search boxes on many webpages for businesses, universities, government, etc. Google is everywhere.
But Google doesn’t always give the best results, just results. I have been cutting back on using Google, and have been using Live and AllTheWeb, with occasional uses for Yahoo (which owns AllTheWeb), Gigablast, Mamma, Clusty, etc. Google is now my #3 choice for search (AllTheWeb is my first choice). Very pleasant to find nice results without having to wade through the junk that clutters the front/top page of these sites.