Last month I posted the search market share numbers and pointed out that Club Live was generating substantial volume of search traffic. I also decided last month to exclude this volume of search queries based on some feedback from all of you. Well it seems there are a number of readers with a whole host of opinions on this matter. Unfortunately there are an equal number of you that agreed with my decision to pull it out and an equal number that said nope, a search is a search no matter how it’s generated. So what’s a third party web analytics guy to do? Well I’ve decided to try to appease everyone by including Club Live this month as a separate line item in our search market share report. Of course more likely than not this is just going to upset all of you. Oh well, we’ll see.

So here’s the year in review with club Live included (sort of).

April was actually the first month in a long while that we saw Yahoo! turn the corner and post a little gain in market share, albeit a small one. Yahoo! query volumes increased roughly 1.3% to push market share up to 14.8%. Maybe that Microhoo press got a lot of people yodeling after all.

Yahoo! gains did not come at the expense of Google. Google moved up a little over a point to roughly 69% market share (based on the new calculation). On the query volume side we saw Google volumes up nearly 45% from the same time last year.

On the Microsoft front things more or less held steady at the core and Club Live dropped off quite substantially. If you aggregate MSN, Windows Live, and Club Live searches you get roughly 11% market share for Microsoft. It’s fairly interesting to note that back in March Club Live generated search queries were larger than all queries posted on Ask. In April this volume dipped a bit but continued to outpace AOLs total search volume.

Both Ask and AOL slid a little market share wise in April.

• Google market share increased 1.1ppts on 0.4% m-o-m volume growth reaching new market share highs… no matter how you look at
• Yahoo! turned the corner with query volume up 1.3% m-o-m and market share back up to 14.8%
• Windows Live Search market share held steady at roughly 8.2% and 11% if you include Club Live
• Ask dipped to 3.5% market share on a 5% decline in search volumes
• AOL dropped to 1.4% on a 10% decline in volume

What do you all think? Club Live in or Club Live out?

*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.

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