• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 14, 2010

Strangely enough, I'm hearing the word "traditional" more often to explain Internet marketing techniques and metrics that determine search engine market share. The analyst firm comScore relies on a method based on "traditional" methodologies to measure search market share, tweaking it occasionally since it began publishing reports in 2003. But apparently changes by search engines prompted the company to take another look at its reporting methods.

Bing's and Yahoo's search market share continue to rise, taking share from Google, which sent comScore analyst back to the drawing board to take another look.

Even comScore acknowledges some stats could become misleading as a result of changes throughout the search industry. Since hearing that Bing will power Yahoo's backend, I continue to question comScore and Wall Street analysts on how they plan to report market share, valuation and growth.

Cameron Meierhoefer, executive vice president of analytics comScore, which began reporting on search engine market share since 2003, said the company has been fidgeting with the metrics. He gave at least two reasons in a post why comScore will make changes to the way it reports market share, which it plans to begin using next quarter.

Comscore reported last week both Yahoo and Microsoft took market share in May, taking share from Google. The gains marketed the third sequential month. Yahoo took 18.3% in May, up from 17.7%, sequentially. Microsoft's Bing rose to 12.1%, up from 11.8% from the prior month. Google declined from 64.4% in April to 63.7% in May.

J.P. Morgan Analyst Imran Khan explains in a published note changes in the way search engines present query results "cloud the picture." Yahoo's and MSN's new interfaces link content with relevant searches, and navigation is now more likely to occur via a series of searches, considered by comScore as "contextual-driven." These types of changes made up 2.4% in April and 4.0% in May, Khan explains. "A change in how Google handles searches with typos may have hurt its total: the site now shows results for the corrected spelling; previously it offered the user a 'did you mean' link," he says.

Over at Piper Jaffray, Senior Research Analyst Gene Munster looks at the comScore data as a neutral for Google, and concurs Web elements funneling into search conducted outside of a traditional box should count as search. He writes that many investors only look at traditional search queries that get typed into text box.

Adjusting the data for non text-box driven searches shows Yahoo slightly declining from 16.9% in April to 16.6% in May, which suggests Yahoo continues to drive more traffic through its search product. Some may debate the value of the added traffic from slideshows and other methods, but Munster views it as traffic that Yahoo earned through technology innovations.

Munster estimates the additional traffic resulted in 363 million views in May, up from 192 million in April. This type of event suggests the notion of "traditional" search queries continues to change.

Take Facebook, for example. Eli Goodman, a comScore analyst, tells us the number of searches on Facebook during the past year more than doubled to 647 million in the United States as of March 2010.

Goodman points to Henry Ford's automobile assembly line technology and the changing relationship in both marketing and consumer behavior in the United States, examples of the circular nature and changing events, as the model for the evolution we see in the search market. He explains that the average number of words per search at the top search properties has been steadily increasing during the past two years, while searches on Facebook continue to contain only two words on average.

What does this mean? Non-people related searches on Facebook look similar to those we saw during the early evolution of the search engines, Goodman explains. I could foreshadow the direction of search on Facebook and social media.

While allocating higher budgets to campaigns running on the search engine with the most market share matters, keep in mind what matters most will always be the search engine producing the highest return on investment.