Compete Revises Search Market Share Numbers; Microsoft May Want Yahoo More Now

Compete just revised UP Yahoo’s market share number significantly – by 5.3 percentage points. To put this number in perspective — combined market share of AOL and ASK.com = 4.1%

On Monday we released our May Search Share numbers. As a result of some conversations we were having with Danny Sullivan in parallel we sent over our “rules” we use to mine the search data. Danny threw these up on his post reviewing our data and one savvy reader very quickly identified an issue with our rules. So, long story short, we have fixed our Yahoo! rules (and also reevaluated all the other engine rules in the process). Here’s the updated data based on adjusted rules.

According to the revised market share numbers, a MSFT/Yahoo Search combination would yield:

Yahoo+MSN/Live = 28.5% combined market share (revised)
Yahoo+MSN/Live = 23.9% (old)

However, as Jeremy points out in his post, trend wise not much has changed. Yahoo Search market share is still trending downwards.

I’m sure folks at Microsoft (and Wall Street) have been watching these numbers closely (along with those from comScore, Hitwise, etc). This revision certainly makes Yahoo worth more, but is it enough for Microsoft to change its mind? Only time will tell.

CORRECTED STATS:

OLD STATS:

Jay Meattle leads all things "Product" at Lookery, an online advertising and user-targeting network. Before Lookery, Jay was the Product Manager of Compete.com, where he managed the overall development and growth of the award winning competitive web intelligence service. You can find him at http://www.hepguru.com/blog.