December 27th, 2005
Search engine share is clear, specific stats need an update
by Susan Snipes
Q Digital Studio offers search engine optimization and marketing to our clients and keeps tabs on SEO and SEM trends, search engine algorithm updates, keyword tracking and a lot more. One point we remind clients of is to focus on more than just Google rankings. It’s important to include MSN and Yahoo! in marketing efforts because they have significant market share. As such, knowing the percentage break down for Internet searches between the major three engines seems pretty handy. However, there are some conflicting and significantly different statistics available online. What are the numbers we give our clients?
WordTracker
Q Digital Studio uses WordTracker as a tool for keyword research.
On one of the competitive analysis screens, WordTracker gives the following statistics:
[Source: WordTracker Competition Search Results, December 27 2005]After looking at these ratios, one might conclude that targeting marketing efforts for Yahoo! is just about as important as optimizing for Google. However, when looking at the market share statistics from Nielsen//NetRatings, we see a different picture.
Nielsen//NetRatings
According to Nielsen//NetRatings, the search market share for October 2005 broke down like this:
[Source: Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, December 13 2005]While there have been some fluctuations in the search market share reported by Nielsen//NetRatings during 2005, the overall percentages have remained consistent for the top three engines.
There is definitely a discrepancy. For one thing, when multiplying Google’s approximate 137 million searches per day number from WordTracker by 30 days in a month, the total is 4.1 billion searches. This is nearly double what Nielsen//NetRatings reports for Google searches in the month of October.
The Nielsen//NetRatings stats listed above are based on data from over a million people whose online behavior is tracked in countries around the world. Where does WordTracker’s market share information come from?
Q Digital Studio got in touch with the WordTracker Help Desk via email about the accuracy and origin of the search engine notes in their software and received the following (prompt and friendly) reply:
“I am sorry but our data is a little out of date - as I understand Google now have in the region of 60% of the search market. We are in the process of updating this data and hope to roll it out early in the New Year.”
While Google doesn’t have 60% of the search market, they do have almost half. And that is quite a bit more substantial than only 35%. It’s good to know that WordTracker will be updating the data in their system. It was a little disconcerting, and we’re probably not the only ones who noticed.
Q Digital Studio continues to recommend that our clients market their sites on Yahoo! and MSN as well as Google. Market shares of 22% and 11% respectively result in huge numbers when there are more than five billion searches performed every month.
