What goes up must come down. This is good news for advertisers. If there is some competition, the price of online advertising will come down.

Does comScore get its data by surveying web users?

GOOG shares already trading down before market opens due to this...

No more than the general market. It's off half a percent and google is off a third.

Strange how this could be...I don't use either of these much, but when I do search for some keywords of interest it comes up with hardly anything that targeted what I was really looking for. I have a Yahoo email address I use often, but never their search if I really want to find something.

Maybe it's word of mouth advertising causing more activity!

Friend 1: "I can't find it on Yahoo, can you?"
Friend 2: " No...let's chat with Friend 3"
Friend 3: "Nope...they said it was Yahoo right? Can't find it either, let's text Friend 4..." :)

Google cannot realistically climb every month forever... they are due to fluctuate... particularly when 3rd party companies are doing the reporting... =)

Imagine 5 years from now:

Google's search share dips from 99.98% to 99.95%. Investors dump stock as it plummets from 5649 to 4539.

;-)

BTW - Google's shares are trading up 10 points as of now...

maybe the search engine scrapers are on holiday

July 22, 2013:

Google's search share dips from 99.98% to 99.95%. Investors dump stock as it plummets from 5649 to 4539.

The drop pulled down the NASDAQ 20%, it's biggest drop ever. Ripple effects caused crashes at all the other worldwide markets.

Google uses its horde of cash to buy up stocks around the world at fire sale prices.

July 23, 2013: CosScore issues a press release apologizing for the incorrect information contained in yesterday's report, which was edited by a dyslexic employee. It should have said Google's share INCREASED from 99.98% to 99.99%.

Yahoo president Carl Icahn demands the FTC lauch an investigation into the incident, as Google also owns ComScore. FTC officials declined to comment from their new offices in Mountain View, CA.

[edited by: LifeinAsia at 4:01 pm (utc) on July 22, 2008]

A drop of .003 isn't exactly banner-headline news--especially with Comscore measuring only the U.S. market.

Does comScore get its data by surveying web users?

Good question, how does any of these traffic tracking organizations get accurate numbers?

Don't believe it folks.

Just a quick check: Google is starting to compete with comScore more and more, right?

how does any of these traffic tracking organizations get accurate numbers?

They absolutely, unequivically do not, under any circumstances, get accurate numbers.

In case there was any doubt :-)

Just a quick check: Google is starting to compete with comScore more and more, right?

That was the first thought which crossed my mind. The article title ensures that it gets wide coverage ;)

Does comScore get its data by surveying web users?

yes, they have 2 shill companies that do online tracking...mostly using a toolbar type app that tracks where users go...like alexa.

What's the margin of error on these measurements? I'm not sure 0.3% is even meaningful. Great for links...

Considering the margin for error on this survey, I think the 0.3% and 0.9% increase for yahoo and MSN, and a "three-tenths of a percentage point" decrease for Google is insignificant.

IMO the data you can trust is the disinterested data from the likes of Efficient Frontier, Rimm-Kaufman Group and other SEMs whose only agenda is to show that they *have* data.

EF's said in the past week that for every new dollar going into search G's getting $1.10, Y!'s giving up $0.07-8 and MSN's giving up the rest.