Hitwise: Google US Search Share Down | Comscore Says the Opposite

[My_Media]

I love to see that Google is loosing it's searches to Bing. This will teach them a leason to launch Panda and Penguin.
I love to see Bing at 50% of all searches.

[techcrunch.com...]

[tedster]

I'm looking for the quote from Amit Singhal - pretty sure he said Google was willing to temporarily sacrifice some market share in order to make some long-term changes. Looks like he got his wish ;)

I think it was somewhere in the flurry of publicity around the Knowledge Graph.

[crobb305]

I'm looking for the quote from Amit Singhal - pretty sure he said Google was willing to temporarily sacrifice some market share in order to make some long-term changes. Looks like he got his wish ;)

Matt also said it in a recent Twitter conversation [twitter.com...]

[jmccormac]

Well if Panda and Penguin were aimed at webmasters, the Host Crowding issue is definitely going to upset users so it will take another few months for that to become apparent in the search trends. There's probably an as yet undetected trend of people having seen Wikipedia results ranking so highly in Google not bothering to use Google and instead going straight to Wikipedia for the answer. Comparing Google stats with Wikipedia stats would be interesting. There's also a generation of schoolkids who, having used Wikipedia for their homework, may well come to rely upon it for other exact match topics.

Regards...jmcc

[edited by: jmccormac at 8:02 pm (utc) on Jun 15, 2012]

[Panthro]

More interesting, I think, is that one-word searches were up almost 20%

[superclown2]

I have no wish whatsoever to see Google fall. I remember the days of Lycos, GoTo, Looksmart etc; these were not golden days at all but times when we often had to pay for every single click or jump through innumerable hoops just to get our sites listed. Google, believe it or not, has been a breath of fresh air in comparison.

Now, sadly, they have lost their way, firstly because of their devotion to big brands at the expense of really useful information sites and now I sit unbelievingly looking at this host crowding issue. Please Google guys, at the moment many people think that you really are the Internet. Don't send them away to try something else instead for all our sakes.

[Rasputin]

The second news item on the same search seems to disagree...
[searchenginewatch.com...]

[grippo]

[comscore.com ] just released this report, where G wins 0.2% of search market.

[londrum]

its interesting to read both of those articles, because none of the numbers match. not a single one!

depending on which one you read, google is either 65% or 66% - down 3%, or up 1%
bing is either 13% or 15% - up 1%, or unchanged
yahoo is either 15% or 13% - up half-a-percent, or down 2%

so, to summerise both articles... google is either up or down, yahoo is either up or down, and bing is either up or unchanged

[tedster]

Clearly the two methodologies for collecting data are at variance - anyone care to dig into the details?

[mrguy]

With the way Google works now doing searches you don't intend to do, I would tend to believe that their actual core of "intended searches" are down.

Which also explains why the article says it hits a record high.

Well ya, when you have to search 3 or 4 times to get what you really wanted in the first place ;)

[My_Media]

Here are my future vision of Google will decline in this search war:
1. Apple is eating up most of the mobile traffics. Google declines as mobile rises.
2. Bing is eating up other smaller search engine so soon or later it will catches up to 40% powered by Bing which latest is around 33%?
3. Facebook is gobble up the internet traffics too.

With these in mind, Google need to work some magic for its earning numbers. The magic is manipulating search results for their own uses and care less for webmasters. They give birth to Panda then Penguin just to fool the world. Support Bing and hope it will rise to 50%.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

It's not just market share google is losing imo, it's google care. It doesn't matter what changes they make if they alienate partners in a key sector of their business.

[AndyA]

I've always thought a large part of Google's market share was Webmasters checking their rankings. Whenever an update occurs, Webmaster searches increase as they check their sites to see changes. SERPs have been changing almost constantly for the past few months, so these types of searches have probably increased.

Google instant, from what I understand, considers SERPs returned while people are still typing as a search; multi-word searches might generate more than one search in Google's opinion, when in reality it's just one person doing one search.

Poor results likely generate additional searches in order to find what the user really wants.

An increased market share or a higher number of searches isn't necessarily a good thing for Google, even that's the way they might spin it. It might not indicate a deeper desire for additional knowledge, it may be an indication of frustration for the Google search user because they aren't finding what they want. Not everyone wants to see Wikipedia, Amazon, etc. Most already know of those sites, and could go directly to them if that's what they wanted.

I think Google is losing sight of the very thing that made it popular: finding the unique pages that really provide the information users want. These pages often won't be perfect, and may have validation errors, or other signs of poor quality. Google has been so busy going after spam, pages with top heavy ads, punishing sites with bad links, etc., that many of those unique pages are now buried.

End users don't care about links to a site from "bad sites." They don't see those links and they don't know about them, they just care about finding the best page for their query. That page won't always be Wikipedia.