(4)
comScore released their January 2009 report on search market share, and for the first time in a while, Google's share declined month to month.
In December 2008, Google had a 63.5 % share, but in January, they dropped down to a 63.0% share. Yahoo gained month to month with a gain from 20.5% to 21.0%.
Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in December with 63.0 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (21.0 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.5 percent), AOL LLC (3.9 percent) and Ask Network (3.7 percent).
In any event, you need to understand this is month to month and you need to look at the numbers over time. So I wouldn't jump to any conclusions after looking at the monthly numbers.
A WebmasterWorld thread is discussing this and one member said something very funny, as to a possible explanation:
maybe it had to do with that malware issue to which google was linking people
Could be... They go to Google, do a search on that Saturday and freak out and leave. Then they head over to #2, Yahoo.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Rob Abdul
02/21/2009 01:12 pm
I agree with this hypothesis: "Could be... They go to Google, do a search on that Saturday and freak out and leave. Then they head over to #2, Yahoo.". I’ve been waiting for an appropriate and relevance article to appear before bringing the following issue up: Q1] Many moons ago on seroundtable.com there was an article about Yahoo slurp visiting site very often and some folk even contemplated blocking slurp via robot.txt. I did not block Slurp and of late have noticed an increase of search traffic from Yahoo. Has anyone else found this? Q2] Quite often when I look at my site stats / raw log files also I see traffic from the Microsoft network, live.com with single keywords like, “Internet”, “ecommerce”, “contact”. I clearly do not appear for those singe keyword words, how is this happening? As a result I discount all traffic from this source.
gabs
02/22/2009 11:50 am
Rob, q1, basically sulp was eating so much bandwidth it was joke as the traffic was a joke.. Many peeps thought about blocking it due to costs vs return... If the cost out way the return then people would of blocked e.g. site with no traffic from yahoo.. q2, the live refferals are just live tests.. ignore them... u can read about it here http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014720.html
Rob Abdul
02/22/2009 04:01 pm
Thank you MR Gabs for you responses.
Darren Tan
02/23/2009 12:58 pm
Haha, i love the explanation. It could be true. :-) Google by the way is for long term, this result isn't changing anything.