Comscore Says It'll Fix Search Share Measurement Now That Yahoo And Microsoft Are Gaming It (YHOO, MSFT, GOOG)
Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing have recently been “gaining” market share in comScore's search engine stats for somewhat sketchy reasons: The companies have increasingly been putting …
Context & Ripple Effects
Monthly comScore rankings have been the running scoreboard of the Bing-Yahoo challenge to Google: the October 2008 read showed Yahoo gaining while Microsoft lost, and the February 2010 results had Bing up yet again. Those headline swings now look softer than they appeared — Silicon Alley Insider reports Yahoo and Microsoft have been inflating apparent gains by routing searches through toolbars and other low-intent paths that comScore counts the same as a query typed into a search box.
Comscore's response, confirmed on June 11, 2010, is a public commitment to rework its methodology so gamed searches stop registering as market-share gains. The story traveled widely the same day, with TechCrunch asking whether May's Bing-and-Yahoo gains were real and Search Engine Land calling outright for an end to the 'bulls**t' share figures — evidence the credibility of the entire monthly scoreboard, not just one month's numbers, was in question.
First-order effects
- Yahoo and Microsoft lose their most quotable proof point: the comScore gains Bing has been posting since 2009 become suspect exactly when the two companies need them to justify their search alliance to advertisers and investors.
- Comscore takes on the cost and risk of a methodology overhaul mid-stream, since any fix will retroactively reframe months of reported Bing momentum — including its own recent releases.
Second-order effects
- Ad buyers pricing search campaigns off share trends face a data vacuum until the revised numbers land, shifting negotiating leverage toward Google, whose dominant position no longer needs inflated comparison points.
- Rival measurement firms get an opening to pitch intent-weighted or click-through-based metrics as more gaming-resistant, fragmenting the single-number convention agencies have relied on.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, raw query volume loses its status as the industry KPI: measurement vendors move toward counting commercially meaningful searches, and portals that monetize distribution (toolbars, defaults) rather than user intent find those deals buy less narrative value.
- It hardens a broader dynamic in which any private benchmark that doubles as a market scoreboard invites the measured parties to optimize for the metric — pushing measurement firms toward audit-grade methodologies or irrelevance.
The trend: Search market share is turning from a settled monthly statistic into a contested metric, as distribution-driven players game panel-based measurement and the measurer is forced to redefine what a search even is.