Search Market Share 2008: Microsoft outperforms the field

What are your search expectations?
If your Web site is written in English, what percentage of traffic would you expect to see come from the Ukraine? 5%? 10%? 50%?

The search engine optimization community generally accepts as axiomatic the Lingual Relevance Limit, which we can articulate as: A web document is only relevant to the language(s) in which it is written. In other words, if you only use English in your Web document, you won’t see very many search referrals from the Ukraine.

However, even though SEOs can understand and accept that creating content in English doesn’t help your Ukrainian search referrals, they cling to the silly notion that what is good for Google is good for Yahoo!. Appearances to the contrary, search engine optimization really does not work that way.

1 Search Engine = 1 Market, 4 Search Engines = 4 Markets
Each major search engine (Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo!) does its own crawling, indexing, and ranking. And though they look for similar criteria in determining the acceptability of Web content, each service has its own features, its own priorities, and its own algorithms. Hence, search engines are not interchangeable — and that means really must optimize for each in order to truly optimize for search across the Web.

No matter how badly you want to, you cannot assume that the data reported by one search engine is equivalent to the data reported by another. You cannot do link research on Yahoo! for Google. You cannot do keyword research on Live for Yahoo! You cannot use Ask’s market demographics to determine what to optimize for on Live.

Microsoft Had Largest Market Share Gain In 2008
That said, the news from both Quantcast and Compete that Microsoft runs the fastest growing search service on the Web has taken off like a lead balloon.

Microsoft’s impressive market growth is by no means an aberration. But neither is that growth corroborated by the analytics and server log data tracked by people who, for all intents and purposes, conduct their search engine optimization as if Google is the only search engine.

Lesson: One optimization strategy does NOT fit all search engines
Here is the lesson to be learned from Microsoft’s sneak attack on the Google search world: if you rely on Google-centric SEO tactics, you’ll achieve your best results on Google. Microsoft search referrals only dominate for people whose focus is on Microsoft search. Now, I’ve seen people complain about not getting into Google but frankly that’s just not hard. Clearly, anyone who cannot get a site into Google is doing something Google doesn’t like.

On the other hand, some people complain that they get better rankings on Yahoo! and Microsoft but more traffic from Google. That’s understandable because rankings reports really don’t tell you what is going on.

You have to look beyond rankings and understand that demographics differ between the search engines. Each search engine has a core audience that is very intensely loyal to that engine. That core audience, according to Quantcast’s estimates, is responsible for an inordinate amount of traffic to the search engine.

Lesson: Search Engine Demographics Define The Markets
For example, Quantcast estimates that in December 2008 1% of Ask’s visitors produced 13% of Ask’s visits, 4% of Search.yahoo.com’s visitors produded 32% of Yahoo! search traffic, 12% of Live.com’s visitors produced 62% of Live’s traffic, and 10% of Google’s visitors produced 50% of Google’s traffic.

Each of these core groups is supplemented by a less loyal group of visitors who are responsible for most of the remaining traffic on the search engine. The demographics for these search audiences differ in several ways (including some that Quantcast does not attempt to measure). People actually search differently on different search engines.

So relying on one set of optimization priorities is the least efficient approach to optimizing for the entire search engine market. And that means that anyone who uses a single set of optimization priorities for the whole market had better be using the best metrics available.

Lesson: Search Market Share Cannot Be Correctly Measured
All search market metrics suck. But the metrics published by Compete, comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen in the name of “search market share” suck worst of all. Compete has no excuse for continuing to publish such awful metrics because anyone who visits their site can see for free that they have much better data to work with.

Several years ago comScore (which had bought Media Metrix) led the metrics market away from measuring market share by number of visitors to measuring by number of queries performed. At the time it seemed to make sense because sites like Yahoo! and Microsoft served many visitors through non-search services and — generally speaking — a query was a query. You expected people to find something to click on or to revise their query (or to go to another search engine).

Google queries are no longer all about Web search
Things have changed considerably since then. First of all, the metrics companies now have the ability to estimate traffic on the basis of search destination (like directory.google.com or search.msn.com). Secondly, people now use queries just to find information without any intention of clicking through to Web sites. People use queries to look up addresses, telephone numbers, correct spellings for words, definitions for words and expressions, product prices and part numbers, maps and driving directions, news, blog posts, answers to calculations, even answers to trivia questions.

You can look yourself up online to see who has created content about you. And search marketers are constantly running automated rank checkers to see where their Web sites fall in the search listings by designated keyword.

All of these types of queries are performed millions of time each day without anyone ever leaving the search engine. And since Google offers more informational query features than the other search engines combined, it should come as no surprise that Google serves more queries per month than any other search engines.

But a search engine is NOT acting like a search engine if it’s not sending traffic to other sites. When you read customer ratings and reviews in Google Maps/Local without leaving Google, you’re using Google as an information source and NOT searching the Web through Google.

Number of Queries only matters if they produce search referrals
Hence, a large undisclosed number of Google queries are not search market queries at all, and they don’t produce traffic for Web sites. All they do is show people that Google is a great destination and informational resource, and people stay on Google for increasingly long periods of time. While that’s great for Google, it’s bad for everyone else.

It’s especially bad for people who mistakenly focus all their optimization on Google. Now, it may be that your Web site more closely matches Google’s demographics than other search engine demographics. But are you just assuming that or have you actually done some market research?

Google’s Real Search Market Share Is Less Than 40%
This is a real problem in the search engine optimization community. Microsoft has aggressively built up its search audience to over 100 million visitors per month according to both Quantcast and Compete. Neither service has to be right but both estimate Google’s December traffic to be about 137-140 million visitors. That’s NOT 90% or even 68% of the search market — it’s not even 40%.

The search engine market consists of all the people who use search engines to search … but search for what? In Web marketing it’s generally understood and assumed that people are using search engines to search for Web sites. Since we know that’s not true we have to look more closely at what we define the search market to be.

How We Should Be Measuring Search Market Share
We are, in fact, really talking about the Web Search Market, which cannot be measured by number of queries performed. It can only be poorly measured by number of visitors and/or number of visits because we don’t have any data for how many people actually pass through the search engines to other Web sites as a result of searching for something.

Great though that last metric would be, only Compete offers any estimates and it charges way too much money for most people to have access to that data. Without any data to compare their data to, we have no reliable means of evaluating its reliability.

In short, we are left with depending on number of searchers, number of searcher visits, or number of searches. Number of searches just doesn’t cut the mustard, it doesn’t work nearly as well as the other two metrics, and it’s way past time the search engine optimization industry said to the four leading metrics companies, “Thank you, but we’re tired of looking at yesterday’s obsolete metrics, please give us better information to work with.”

Compete, remember, is the only one of the four leading metrics companies that provides better information and yet refuses to work with that information when publishing its monthly estimates.

The following charts were compiled from data provided by Compete (numbers are given in 1000s). You can download the data yourselves for free (until Compete updates its free data reports in February). You can check our data and see for yourselves what it really looks like. You can also capture data from Quantcast and make your own comparisons.

The facts are indisputable: Microsoft has outperformed every other search engine in the field in terms of growing its search market audience. Microsoft is keeping pace with Google in terms of growing its number of search visits. I’ll be following up with more data in the next article.

The SEO community has been grossly misled about the significance and importance of the various major search engines. You have been schooled to ignore and turn your backs on large audiences of potential visitors and customers for your Web sites.

And where is the return on investment in THAT kind of self-limiting marketing strategy?