Bloomberg : Google is losing market share to Yahoo

Our stats are saying otherwise, based upon our analysis of our clients we are not seeing the same thing that Bloomberg is reporting.

Google’s slice of the U.S. search market fell to 75.2 percent in December from 79.3 percent a year ago, while Yahoo jumped to 10.4 percent from 7.4 percent, according to analytics firm StatCounter. That put Google at its smallest share of the U.S. Web search market since at least 2008, when StatCounter first started tracking the numbers, and the highest share for Yahoo since 2009.

The problem with this reporting is it is coming from Statcounter, a third party that most likely will have difficulty getting the proper results.   See the vast majority of the referral traffic is encrypted via HTTPS, redirects and several other factors that tend to mask where and how the traffic is coming into a website.

Google is the one that pioneered this masking of search traffic.    so it tends to make sense that they are ahead of others in terms of masking their referrals.

We’re not saying that Statcounter is lying,  we’re just saying that they are making a conclusion based on partial and decreasing data sets.