Marketing Pilgrim

Cause you’re hot then you’re cold
You’re yes then you’re no
You’re in and you’re out
You’re up and you’re down

I think perhaps Katy Perry should get out of the music business and get into the world of search engine metrics. I suggest this because she hits the nail on the head, when it comes to analyzing the market share of the various search engines.

After Nielsen yesterday painted a picture that portrayed additional market share for Yahoo, a drop for Google, and an overall climb in search activity, comScore decides to whitewash over it with a completely different picture of the industry in the U.S.

First, overall searches didn’t climb, but actually dropped 3.5% from June to July. And, while it concurs Google saw a drop in search share–albeit a more modest 0.3%–it’s also claiming Yahoo saw its share drop from 19.6% to 19.3%.

So, who is comScore declaring the victor? Bing! Its data suggests Microsoft’s Bing grew its search share from 8.4% to 8.9%–and almost 1% growth overall, since Bing launched.

All this really proves is how inaccurate the different research companies are–and that you shouldn’t ever look at one month’s data in isolation. And, really, do any of these numbers actually matter? Isn’t revenue earned from search, the only number we should be measuring?