Ask Jeeves Market Share Grows 77% in 5 Months

[tedster]

Ask Jeeves edged out players such as My Way Search to rank fifth in market share [behind Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL]. The search engine experienced a 77 percent growth in market share...

[clickz.com...]

[martinibuster]

That's a strange statement because they own My Way Search.

The rest of the quote says:

The search engine experienced a 77 percent growth in market share to reach 2.6 percent.

Last year AJ trumpeted [news.bbc.co.uk] that their acquisition of Interactive Search Holdings doubled their market share to 7% (simple math indicates they claimed a 3.5% market share prior to the acquistion)

The acquisition will increase Ask Jeeves' market share to 7% by adding the iWon, Excite and My Search web sites to its Ask.com search engine.

Why do Ask Jeeves' Press Releases not add up, lending them an air of unbridled hype?
So my questions are:

• Did their market share drop 3.5% to 2.6% from 2004?
  
• Does their current claim of 2.6% market share include all of their search properties or just AJ?
  
• How does a reduction of .9% of market share equate to a 77% increase?
  
• What happened to their total 7% market share, did that grow too? Or was that a total smoke screen, too?
  
• Will Ask Jeeves ever get their facts straight?

[ByronM]

To answer your market share question, the overall search market could have expanded 100000% and allowed ask jeeves to expand upon its own traffic 77% yet have an overall reduction of .9% because it ultimately wasn't able to expand as quick as the general market did.

But just like the president, you only tell people what they want to hear.