An audience-measurement business is raising competitors' hackles by claiming its new service provides more accurate data. But the company's conclusion that Google leads the search site pack, with Yahoo close behind, is unlikely to provoke controversy.
The service, qSearch, was unveiled on Monday by ComScore Media Metrix, a consulting unit of ComScore Networks that specialises in consumer behaviour. The service examines search queries entered into 25 portals and search engines by members of a pool of 1.5 million international Web surfers recruited through random phone-digit dialling and direct marketing techniques.
ComScore said the service would bring new accuracy to the task of measuring what consumers are searching for online. It criticised competitors for evaluating search sites through indirect measurements like visitor counts, citing data that shows that only 64 percent of people who visit a portal or search site wind up actually searching there in any given month.
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News source: Yahoo News UK
The service, qSearch, was unveiled on Monday by ComScore Media Metrix, a consulting unit of ComScore Networks that specialises in consumer behaviour. The service examines search queries entered into 25 portals and search engines by members of a pool of 1.5 million international Web surfers recruited through random phone-digit dialling and direct marketing techniques.
ComScore said the service would bring new accuracy to the task of measuring what consumers are searching for online. It criticised competitors for evaluating search sites through indirect measurements like visitor counts, citing data that shows that only 64 percent of people who visit a portal or search site wind up actually searching there in any given month.
View: The full, searching article News source: Yahoo News UK
Whatever its originality, early numbers from qSearch, which include data collected since the beginning of the year, confirm what industry watchers have suspected for some time: Google leads the pack among search sites, with Yahoo -- which uses Google's engine to produce search results for Yahoo sites -- close behind.
Google.com accounts for 33 percent of all queries by English-speaking searchers, ComScore said. In the United States alone, Yahoo leads with 26 percent of the approximately 790 million searches performed in the states during the time covered by the qSearch report.
"We've seen (Google) move up to the No. 1 position in the last 12 months, based on worldwide activity," said James Lamberti, vice president of ComScore Entertainment and Media Solutions. "But Yahoo is much stronger domestically than people understood before our data became available."
ComScore attributed Yahoo's strength in the United States to its specialised sites like Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Yellow Pages, where more than half of Yahoo queries took place.
ComScore's first report offered good news for second- and third-tier search sites. Dogpile, a "meta search engine" that queries a range of other engines, had a "visitor-to-searcher" conversion rate -- or the percentage of people who visit a site and then end up searching there -- of 83 percent. Ask Jeeves, a so-called natural language query engine, scored a 75 percent conversion rate.
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