Microsoft Web Search Market Share
April 18, 2009
Joe Wilcox’s “Microsoft US Search Queries Rise in March” surprised me. You can read his article here. Estimates of online used are fraught with wackiness. If you have been asked to review actual log files for a high traffic site for a month, you know that the counts are reasonably accurate. There are those exciting anomalies such as losing a 48 hour chunk of data for no apparent reason. Most of the big outfits have fancy math to smooth out the hiccups in their statistical analyses. Smoothing is good. So is calculating an acceptable margin of error. Not surprisingly the major usage reports are indicative, not definitive. The question should be, “How far off are these data?” In my experience, somewhere in the 15 to 20 percent range.
Now if we look at the data about Microsoft’s usage, we notice that Mr. Wilcox focuses on an “increase” in Microsoft traffic of 0.1 percent, that is, 8.2 percent in February 2009 to 8.3 percent in March 2009. Apply the margin of error value that makes you comfortable and there’s not much of a change between Google and Microsoft.
The interesting point for me was that Google increased its share despite the lousy economy by a more robust 0.4 percent. But this too is irrelevant. Google’s share of the US search market, according to my goslings number crunching is getting near 80 percent. I like the idea that Google may be getting some competition after a decade of clear sailing, but the competitors need to hurry. Unless Microsoft can leapfrog Google, I don’t see much hope of making its many search investments payoff.
Stephen Arnold, April 18, 2009
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
