Comparing Bing, Yahoo, Google: Get Beyond Search

(MoneyWatch)  A recent Nielsen comparison of search results for U.S. search engines again raised one of those periodic fascinations for the tech industry. This one is called Who's On Top In Search. But I wonder if the measures people are taking do justice to the question.

Total searches on MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search increased 22.1 percent month-over-month in August, making it the fastest growing search provider among the top 10. Share of searches for Bing increased from 9.0 percent in July to 10.7 percent in August. Google Search continued as the No. 1 search provider, with 7.0 billion searches and a 64.6 percent search share.

Interesting enough, as Microsoft is showing that it might be able to create at least a little quiver in the search market, though of limited practice use. Nielsen notes that its methodology for measuring search has seen so many changes of late that you can't trend the data from before June 2009. That still leaves the possibility for a reasonable comparison, but it's only one way to compare the sites, and not necessarily the most analytically satisfying.

Although Google has proven search to be marvelously profitable -- in fact, pretty much the only thing at the company that you can give that title -- there are other types of online advertising revenue. I started to wonder whether the driving focus was missing important metrics. As the Nielsen data is for the U.S., let's stay there, only with Compete.com, where data is more readily available. However, let's look at an estimate of unique visitors to the sites, because the potential money is ultimately in the people who come to your site and use it: I don't know about you, but I find this is eye-opening. Here are some things that immediately jump out:

• Google may be a little ahead, but Yahoo has remained neck-and-neck in total traffic, at least if we're not considering YouTube.com. But from a branding point of view, I suspect that people consider the two sites different.
• Both Google and Yahoo have continued to grow in traffic, which is pretty amazing, as it's long past when you'd expect that from a general market growth alone.
• Bing suddenly looks curious. On one hand, it's gone from 0 to 50 million users. But Live.com was redirecting traffic there. And yet Live.com still has more traffic. Significantly more. Do we add the two? Do the Live numbers represent the real story? Is there something else going on?
• For all the disdainful dismissal in the past, Live wasn't a marginal player when considered from a unique visitor perspective. It may not have had the traffic of either Yahoo or Google, but upwards of 100 million unique visitors a month is nothing to sneeze at.

So who's winning? I think a better question for the industry might be, "What would winning actually mean?"

Image via stock.xchng user mckenna71, site standard license.