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Last week, Hitwise released a report on search share, saying for one, Bing rose 6% in share, while Google fell 2% (Google still has 68% share). But the report also shared that Bing is a more successful search engine, having a success rate of 81.5% compared to Google's success rate of 65.5%.
Hitwise explained:
Bing and Yahoo! Search achieved the highest success rates in January 2011. This means that for both search engines, more than 81 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a Website. Google achieved a success rate of 65 percent. The share of unsuccessful searches highlights the opportunity for both the search engines and marketers to evaluate the search engine result pages to ensure that searchers are finding relevant information.
Now, Google's Matt Cutts took issue with this and shared it on Buzz. He said, and I am quoting only a bit of his argument:
Hitwise later confirmed to me that they don't know whether the user actually clicked on a search result or just went to a completely unrelated site. Given all that, I'm surprised to see Hitwise is still pushing this metric and still calling it "search success rate." I'm also surprised that Computerworld turned that into "Bing searches more accurate than Google's."
Google is taking a beating on their search quality in the past six-months. The two Bs (Bing & Blekko) are beating them up and so far winning.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
