When is Compete going to stop adjusting their search market share methodology? To be perfectly honest … never. It’s what we do, analyze our data and strive to bring you the most accurate perspective on what consumers are doing online. Improvement sometimes means change… for the better. We recently did an exhaustive dive into our data over the past few months and adjusted our normalization process. This month’s search market share represents the new and improved numbers. You’ll notice a few changes to the numbers in January through April.

This month we decided to take a slightly different take on the Club Live search data … again. This time we’re presenting the data with and without Club Live lumped into the MSN/Live search numbers. While this inevitably impacts the overall volume perspective for MSN/Live, from a trend perspective it really doesn’t change much.

For the first time in a while Google was the one and only major web search engine to gain share in May. Overall web search queries grew about 2% from April to May while Google managed to grow volume by 3.6% m-o-m. Every other major engine saw a decline in both volume of queries and market share in May. This includes even MSN/Live where the losses are even more pronounced when you fold in the decline in Club Live generated queries.

On the bright side MSN/Live, in contrast to everyone except Google, has managed to improve from their position last year. MSN/Live market share in May ’08 was just slightly above year ago levels when you ignore Club Live. If you fold in Club Live there’s actually been fairly substantial growth in MSN/Live’s piece of the pie.

In a nutshell …

• Google market share rose to new heights on solid volume gains … next up 3 out of 4 web searches. Any bets on when we’ll see that.
• Despite a slight turn in April, Yahoo! began to slide once more, dipping to a new all time low market share
• Windows Live Search market share declined ½ ppt or nearly a whole point depending on whether you count Club Live queries … guess you have to take the good with the bad
• Ask dipped slightly but managed to hold just above the 3% mark on relatively minimal volume declines
• AOL dropped to a new low hovering just above the 1% mark

If you want to get your hands on the actual data in this post and a lot more don’t forget to check out Compete’s Data Hub.

*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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