With Microsoft and Yahoo joining forces to give Google a run for its money in the search game, the monthly report from comScore tallying market share will be more closely watched than ever. But as new features creep into search engines that appear to skew the results, the Web metrics firm is changing its methodology.
For the month of July, comScore began breaking out searches into two distinct categories: core search and explicit core search. That came in response to features like the slide shows that have popped up on the Bing and Yahoo search engines, which appeared to have generated queries that users might not intended to have made.
So under the new criteria, how do the big three stand up? E-Commerce Guide takes a look.
A leading Web analytics firm has added a new calculation method to its monthly search engine figures in the face of controversy over how it defines searches. The question, however, is how that affects the numbers that search engine optimizers and Web advertisers use to determine where to spend their dollars each month.
The difference is an important one, and one that advertisers are not likely to sort out immediately.
