The internet audience rating services seem to come up with a new wrinkle almost every month. The latest big thing is "minutes spent per month". It's not enough to know how many people visit a website or how many page views it has.
comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR) has come up with another new measurement. In the past, if a user put a term into the Google search box and looked for the term in general search, news, and images, that activity would count as one search. It now counts as three.
According to The Wall Street Journal, "Google is the biggest beneficiary of the change. In March, Google's share would have been six percentage points higher than it was under the old system." No one will be surprised by that.
In comScore's ranking of the search market in the US for July, Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) share was 55.2% compared to 46.2% a year ago. Yahoo!'s (NASDAQ: YHOO) share fell from 29.8% to 23.5% over the same period. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) went from 12.4% to 12.3%.
New method, same results.
Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.
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