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Are Yahoo and Microsoft trying to game comScore for a better market share?
Business Insider just published June's comScore Search Numbers. The picture is actually quite predictable; Google seriously dominates the market, and Microsoft and Yahoo trail behind. There's no big news there.
What is interesting is that comScore apparently thinks that Yahoo and Microsoft are trying to game its system. For example, both Bing and Yahoo show relevant search suggestions at the top of the results page. Clicking a suggestion generates another search query, which serves to boost that search engine's market share in comScore's reports.
This is but one tactic that Microsoft and Yahoo use. Business Insider claims that the companies have been "putting a ton of links on their popular homepages that are search queries disguised as content, and have been stitching together image slideshows as search queries, too."
Personally, I think this is utter hype. If you look at Google's sidebar, you will see that clicking the sidebar (or any type of search refinement) will also cause more search queries to be sent to Google's servers.
The only difference here is that, unlike Google, both Microsoft and Yahoo have major portals and content sites. So, these two companies are simply tying their search engines tightly into their content sites; after all, for many people "Internet" and "search" are almost synonymous. Is that really so bad?
The bottom line is that comScore is going to adjust the numbers to "compensate" for this; in fact, June's numbers are already posted along with the adjustments. I think that this is mainly because Microsoft and Yahoo are not Google; they work differently – does that mean they're "gaming the system?"
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsAdamJul 13th 2010 11:11AM
I definitely think MS and Yahoo are doing this on purpose. They are disguising search queries as content. It should be clear which is which.
jeff.siegelJul 13th 2010 11:27AM
I can't speak to this specific practice, but it's common -- and bad business -- for Web sites that depend on traffic numbers for ad rates and the like to put unnecessary links on a site. That way, when a visitor stops by, they have to click through three or four links instead of one or two, which boosts time on site, viewed pages and similar numbers.
DeoWulfJul 13th 2010 11:43AM
If they're talking about how clicking on the little image squares on the Bing picture generates search queries, I'm pretty sure the point of that is to illustrate how you can use Bing to discover things. Besides, usually if you click on those things, you were interested in what they were and probably would have searched for them anyway...
SilverWaveJul 14th 2010 2:34PM
Its Microsoft so by definition the answer is yes.
D'oh!