Yahoo and Microsoft artificially pad their search shares

[Matthew DeCarlo]

ComScore has released its May 2010 US Search Data report showing upward trends for both Bing and Yahoo, while Google supposedly lost a bit of share during April – but that's not entirely accurate. According to the research outfit, Yahoo and Microsoft are fudging the numbers by including links on their sites that are search queries disguised as content.

For instance, last month Yahoo had some 284 million search queries of "contextual searches." An example of contextual searches can be found in features like photo slideshows in Yahoo News, in which every click to a new slide counts as an additional query. Below each photo are results from an automatic "related search" query. Naturally, this artificially pads the company's organic search figures.

Without adjusting its numbers to account for those tactics, comScore puts Yahoo and Bing at 18.3% and 12.1%, up from 17.7% and 11.8% in the month prior. Meanwhile, Google's search presence fell slightly to 63.7% from 64.4% in April. ComScore plans to tweak its methodology by July or August, but for May's figures, others say Yahoo's share actually fell to 16.6% and Redmond was flat.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/39276-yahoo-and-microsoft-artificially-pad-their-search-shares.html

 

[TomSEA]

LOL.... NO! For real?

Reminds me of when Facebook proudly announces that they have umpteen million users but conveniently neglect to mention that a huge portion of those are "surrogate" accounts. One of my work buddy's daughter has NINETEEN Facebook accounts.

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

What does one do with a dozen and a half Facebook accounts? :/ I imagine they're largely unused?

 

[Timonius]

Reminds me of website usage statistics: Hits vs Visits vs Unique Visitors, etc.

 

[red1776]

TwoFacebook....

What does one do with a dozen and a half Facebook accounts? :/ I imagine they're largely unused?

Alternate identities and aliases ya know? so you can be a 'playa'.....just what I've heard, I'm just sayin.

 

[TomSEA]

What red1776. According to my co-worker, she uses one account for Farmville. Another one for Mafia Wars. Another one for "just close" friends." Another for "sometime friends." One "just for family." And on and on and on.

(shrugs) Hard to explain how a teenage girl's mind works.

 

[red1776]

TomSEA said:
What red1776. According to my co-worker, she uses one account for Farmville. Another one for Mafia Wars. Another one for "just close" friends." Another for "sometime friends." One "just for family." And on and on and on.

(shrugs) Hard to explain how a teenage girl's mind works.

I know Tom, I really do not understand the over the top appeal of the FB/MySpace thing....but I'm old so what do I know?
as far as the teenage girls mind, it starts even younger than that. I have a very sophisticated 10 year old, and when she is filling me in on the latest hip news, I can often be seen looking like a dog seeing a ceiling fan for the first time.

 

[tengeta]

Yeah, I'm totally sure Google and other search engines aren't guilty of this... hah.