What's the REAL Organic Search Market Share?

If you work in interactive marketing, you’re are probably familiar with comScore and its monthly estimate of the United States search market share that consistently looks like the following graph, reflecting data collected September 2011. It’s safe to assume that these numbers apply to the websites that you promote as well, right? Not really.

For the past few years, it seems like every dataset that I’ve seen contradicts these market share reports, so I decided to dig a little deeper and see what I can find.

SEO Optimization Tips for the Yahoo-Bing Merge

While Google has reigned supreme when it comes to optimization, now may be the time to reassess your Bing strategy. As we mentioned in an earlier post, Yahoo anticipates that their organic search results will be fully powered by Microsoft sometime in August or September. However, Yahoo has already begun testing Microsoft’s organic and paid listings. Up to 25% of their current organic search results come from Bing, while up to 3.5% of paid listings can be from their AdCenter.

While the results may be coming from Microsoft, Yahoo assures that they will retain their familiar format. They offer up the following image, where the boxed areas are those that come from Microsoft:

Fall 2010 Yahoo Will Show Bing Organic Results

Last week, Yahoo sent out emails explaining how the merger with MSN/Bing would effect paid search advertiser.  The most interesting piece of information the email provided was about the transition to Bing search algorithm in early Fall.

Organic Search Transition
To date, we’ve focused most of our communications to you on the paid search transition to adCenter. However, another key aspect of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is the transition of Yahoo! organic search results (those found on the main body of the page). Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September timeframe.