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Codebreaker

Search engine popularity metrics range from opaque to meaningless

John Moe Jun 11, 2010

I’ve been trying to make sense of a couple recent articles about the latest information on the popularity of the major search engines. It seems like Bing and Yahoo had a pretty good gain in market share but were also doing various tricks to display multiple pages, acquire more hit counts, and manipulate the results. So depending on how you look at it, Bing and Yahoo gained ground on Google OR they were both flat while Google dominated even more than before. The write ups on this that I’ve caught seem to agree that it’s increasingly hard to get a read on who’s doing well where. And while that’s just math noise to a degree, remember that search is at the very heart of Google and the place they make the lion’s share of their money. Meanwhile, Bing is the vanguard of Microsoft’s push to be in the cloud, outgrow their desktop model, and SURVIVE. So if there’s no way to really measure who’s doing well, that kind of leaves us in a pickle, doesn’t it?

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