ComScore has reported this week that both Yahoo and Microsoft “gained” share in the U.S. search market for May, although both companies appear to be using gimmicks to distort the numbers in their favor.
By the numbers, Google remained the clear leader but share fell from 64.4 percent in April to 63.7 percent in May. Yahoo gained share, from 17.7 percent to 18.3 percent. Microsoft’s Bing jumped to 12.1 percent, from 11.8. AOL fell marginally from 2.4 percent to 2.3.
BusinessInsider reports, however, that both companies are “gaming” the stats, by placing thousands of links on their respective homepages that are search queries pretending to be content.
Additionally, the companies have been creating image slideshows as search engines, as well, in an effort to get additional clicks.
Analyst Ben Schachter of Broadpoint Amtech says without the tricks, real search traffic numbers would have shown Yahoo falling to 16.6 percent, Microsoft holding flat at 10.8 percent and Google gaining to 66.4 percent.
Following the revelations, comScore says it will change the way it accounts for share, so the industry does not consider their work worthless.
Result for: search engines
According to the latest Experian Hitwise figures, two of the major search engines lost market share in March to Ask.com, which increased for the fourth consecutive month, and Yahoo.
Google fell marginally to 69.97 percent, Yahoo increased their share 3 percent to 15.04 percent and Bing fell for the third straight month, falling 1 percent to 9.62 percent.
Ask was the big winner, increasing 21 percent month-on-month to 3.44 percent.
Experian says 69 other search engines account for the remaining 1.93 percent.
Result for: search engines
According to new digging from 9to5Mac, Wikipedia is likely to be added as one of the default search engines for Safari on the iPad as well as upcoming versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch.
The code is seen in the iPhone 3.2 SDK, and will be the third default behind Google and Yahoo.
It is still unclear why Wiki is being added over Bing or other true search engines, especially because Wikipedia has a very popular free app as well, but still interesting.
