Compete Data Tweak the Google

April 8, 2008

LiveSide.net provided a summary and helpful chart on April 4, 2008. The article’s sub title states, “New Compete.com search share numbers show surprising surge for Live Search.” The use of the word surge caught my attention. At age 64, surge to me has an old school meaning; namely, “a strong, wavelike, forward movement, rush, or sweep.” I read the article and looked at the Compete.com numbers and concluded that a post-modern meaning has been applied to surge.

The LiveSide.net article’s main point to me is:

Compete.com released their version of March US search market share numbers …, showing a surprising surge for Live Search, up nearly four percentage points from February (a notoriously slow, and short, month), and up 0.7% year over year. In addition, search volume (the number of searches performed) was up significantly as well. Also notable was that for the first time in nine months, Google lost market share.

Hmmm. I wondered about the surge. The table provides some clues here. I took these data and calculated the number of searches per minute by each service. Based on the Compete.com data, Google is averaging 2,346 queries per second. The surge notion is that Microsoft’s queries per second are 344 per minute, a difference of a few clicks, about 2,000.

The surge is more about percent change that clicks. Live.com, according to Compete.com, tallied 922 million in March 2007 searches up from 716 million in February 2007. Google, by contrast, generated about 6.3 billion searches in March 2008, up from 6.0 billion in February 2008. Not only is Microsoft’s base smaller than Google’s, the search differential is growing.

Perhaps I am misreading these data. Let me know if you think the gap is closing and the sky is falling in Google’s part of the world.

Note: Hitwise released numbers of its own recently; that consultancy says Google has a 64% marketshare in US searches for March, with MSN Search back at 5.25%.

The Google has a hefty lead, and it will take some time to bridge the gap.

Stephen Arnold, April 8, 2008

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Google, Microsoft, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.