Experian Hitwise has published a reporting claiming that Yahoo and Bing are more effective than Google.
Using raw data from July 2011 searches on the different search engines, they concluded that 81% of searches on Yahoo results in a visit to a website and 80% of searches results on Bing resulted in a visit. However, according to Hitwise, only 66% of searches on Google resulted in a visit to a Website.
The data is supposed to suggest that those search engines are better, and that Google is losing its touch in search results.
Of course Microsoft’s Bing, who also powers the Yahoo search engine now, has pushed the press to try to report on it, claiming that it clearly shows that their intelligent search engine, dubbed the “decision engine” is actually more accurate in finding what users want.
What’s interesting about the study is that it completely ignores a simple fact about Google: that with every search, there is also Google Instant that often shows more than one search query while a user types. This would easily account for a significant different based on raw data.
Another expert dropping the ball?
