comScore’s search numbers for April are out and although the numbers don’t lie, they don’t give you the full picture either.  Thanks to significant changes to the user interface for all three search giants, making a straight comparison between April and March figures is not necessarily an accurate analysis.

(Source: comScore)

If Yahoo’s growth were taken at face value, it would be impressive.  However, much of its growth is being attributed to its new “slideshow” feature, which automatically generates additional queries as one image is displayed after another.  Not the same as user-generated, intentional web searches. As Broadpoint.Amtech analyst Ben Schachter points out, “This will likely continue to benefit YHOO’s numbers going forward, and also likely explains why YHOO has been so confident in saying that the March quarter would be its bottom in terms of share.”

And, according to eWeek.com, much the same can be said of Microsoft’s Bing, which also started using new “slideshow” image searches in several of its search categories in April.

On the flip side, Google’s UI changes have actually lowered its reported query volume by combining organic web searches and any following news/video searches all into one search.  Regardless, despite a mild 0.5 percent decrease in its market share from March, Google is still king of the mountain with 64.4 percent of the market and its query volume consistently growing 6 percent each year.

It is worth noting that Yahoo has been working closely with comScore to make sure that the queries generated by its slideshow interface are counted incrementally. UBS analysts Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald both say the slide shows accounted for about 6% of Yahoo’s total traffic. And, moving forward, it will be interesting to see how comScore adjusts to account for these non-user generated searches resulting from such methodologies.

Tags: Google, Ranking, Yahoo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Google, Other Search Engines, Yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.