Google’s Search Share Drops…But Don’t Panic
When monthly figures get released and Google’s search share has dropped it always seems alarming at first. Every search engine specialist in the world scrambles to see the graphs and analyse the figures. Changes in search share can affect the way an internet advertising agency maps out its strategy. At first the month of June seemed like cause for concern. But don’t be fooled by statistics because they are often misleading, as we can see below.
According to comscore.com figures for June 2010, both Yahoo and Bing have increased their share.
Search Share Figures June 2010.
- Google: 62.6% – down 1.1 points from 63.7% in May
- Yahoo: 18.9% – up 0.6 points from 18.3% in May
- Bing: 12.7% – up 0.6 points from 12.1% in May
- Ask: 3.6% – unchanged
- AOL: 2.2% – down 0.1 points from 2.3% in May
However, have a look at the overall search volume and you will see a completely different picture
Search Volume Figures June 2010:
- Google: 10.292 billion – up 134 million from 10.158 billion in May, a 1.3% increase
- Yahoo: 3.114 billion – up 206 million from 2.908 billion in May, a 6.6% increase
- Bing: 2.082 billion – up 152 million from 1.930 billion in May, a 7.3% increase
These figures show us that all three big players are up, unlike the share figures which show us that Google is down. So why is this? Well, the rate of searches keeps growing, so even a small amount of searches might actually represent a bigger amount of searches when compared to past search statistics. So the share can actually drop but the volume can increase.
The fact is Google is still growing, and even if they were to stop growing and Yahoo were to keep growing at their current rate it would be a good year before a search engine specialist of internet marketing agency need be concerned.
