The Doctor is In: "AOL, Ask Jeeves search growth outpaces leaders," or does it?
Dr. Vladimir Crk is WebSourced's Director of Six Sigma Quality Assurance and Marketing Statistical Analysis. In a previous life, Vladimir led the Design for Six Sigma and Reliability as well as the process development and improvement programs for a fortune 100 company.

Now he's in charge of Quality Control for our Internet Marketing programs as well as Statistical Marketing Analysis, of which he'll be delivering a weekly dose of here in Search Engine Lowdown.

In his coming statistical analysis of data from Nielsen//NetRatings, comScore, and data mined from our SEM Web Services marketing analytics platform, he'll deliver actionable interactive marketing insights for CXOs seeking leading edge marketing insights.

This week the Doctor cracks down on the recent news of AOL and Ask Jeeves outpacing Google and Yahoo in search growth. Is 16% growth impressive? The Doctor thinks not.

"AOL, Ask Jeeves search growth outpaces leaders," or does it?

On Friday, July 29, 2005, the Center for Media Research published the number of searches for the top 5 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask Jeeves), the information based on the Nielsen/NetRating report for the Q1 and Q2 of 2005. Also, c/net news.com refers to the Reuters news with the same story. The news states that, comparing Q1 and Q2, the significant increase of the number of searches has been identified for AOL and Ask Jeeves (15% and 16%, respectively), while Google and Yahoo have maintained the single digit growth (6% and 9%, respectively). Based on the comparison of the number of searches for Q1 and Q2 for each engine individually the growth can be illustrated in the following figure (as published).



"Ken Cassar, director of strategic analysis, Nielsen//NetRatings, said "While it's far too early to say that Google needs to watch its back, a resurgent AOL makes the game a lot more interesting.""

The above percentages are calculated with respect to the previous quarter number of searches on the same search engine. So, let's see if the above statement could be a real basis for any concern for the major search engines, at least for now.

Looking at the overall number of searches for the top 5 engines for each quarter we will get a slightly different picture. The distribution of the number of searches for Q2, for example, can be illustrated in the following figure.



As shown above, about 47.4% of all the searches in Q2 have been done using Google and 21.8% of all the searches in Q2 has been done using Yahoo. The following figure compares the number of searches by each engine to the overall number of searches for given quarter.



It is apparent that, comparing Q1 and Q2, there is no significant change in the distribution of the overall number of searches by the search engines. For example, the percent of the total number of searches using Google has increased from 46.8% in Q1 to 47.4% in Q2, and the number of searches using Yahoo has increased from 21.0% in Q1 to 21.8% in Q2. At the same time, the Google – Yahoo ratio of the number of searches (2.2.: 1) has not changed from Q1 to Q2, which indicates that the overall number of searches has increased but the "popularity" of any of the search engine over the others has not changed significantly, at least for now.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |