Web Search Usage Statistics
October 16, 2009
comScore has responded to earlier data from about Web search vendors’ September 2009 market share. I found the write up What 5% Drop? ComScore Says Bing Search Share Stayed Steady In September in TechCrunch thought provoking. For me, the meat of the article was this comment:
According to comScore, Bing’s U.S. search market share remained steady at 9.4 percent in September, up from 9.3 percent in August. That is not blowing the doors off of anything, but it is at least holding its own.
I find it interesting that the estimates of traffic are viewed as absolutes. Most of the companies creating league tables use proprietary methods to generate their data. Variances are to be expected. The margins of error can be significant. In one case in 2008, I looked at data for companies in one industry in Europe. I had “real” logs. I also had reports on traffic from a number of vendors. What I learned was that the variance between the actual logs of the sites’ traffic and the commercial league tables was a variance of as much as 20 percent.
I don’t have an answer for the usage variances. The advantage goes to the company that can count everything and avoid statistical methods. Estimates are going to create some false impressions in my experience.
Stephen Arnold, October 16, 2009
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