I was doing some digging around looking for some figures on the size of the Web and search engines in particular for a paper I am putting together. The good news was both Nielsen and ComScore came out with figures last week, the bad news was that they seem to contradict each other.
ComScore said that the total number of searches world-wide in October 2008 was up from 10.5 billion to 12.6 billion when compared to October 2007. Total searches world-wide as calculated by Nielsen were 7.8 billion, a fall of 2% from the previous October figures. A few billion here and a few billion there and we may be talking about a bank bail-out!
In both cases Google increase their size of the market (61.2% Nielsen and 61.1% for ComScore) with Yahoo and MSN losing ground.
The market share figure is not surprising. In fact if asked to guess I would have put Google in excess of 70% based on the figures that we see here. The total search figure difference is harder to understand. Clearly the two agencies have different methods but the difference between a 2% fall and a 20% gain is considerable.
We have seen traffic figures this month as either flat or slightly down. We feel this is a result of the economic environment and also a season dip in November.
We will watch with interest the December figures where normally we would expect an increase.
