Recent numbers from comScore indicate that Yahoo! and Bing have made strides in the search engine market this year, but there has been a great deal of controversy as to whether or not those gains were real.  So, since we see traffic generated by search engines rather than queries entered (as comScore does), we thought we’d take a look at our own data from April through the 13th of July, to see whether or not it appeared the slideshow trick really skewed the data.

As it turns out, comScore appears to be right about actual market share changes.  Between April and July, Yahoo! has picked up one percent of the market, Bing has picked up over two percent, and Google has seen a corresponding decline in traffic generated.

Yahoo and Bing April through July 14Search market April through July 14

So, perhaps the concerns about Yahoo! artificially inflating their search market share are less concerning than we first thought.  In the meantime, Google is still far and away the dominant player in the search engine market, much to the surprise of absolutely nobody.  Across the Chitika network, which provides a pretty huge cross-section of the Internet, Google still generates nearly 86% of all search traffic.

The Numbers:

Google Yahoo! Bing AOL Ask
April 88.9% 4.9% 4.4% 0.8% 1%
May 88.5% 5.2% 4.7% 0.8% 0.9%
June 86.8% 5.3% 6.1% 0.9% 1%
July (MTD) 85.8% 5.9% 6.6% 0.8% 0.9%

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