This week web measuring company Compete released the June market share for search engines. Google still leads the pack with 62% of the market share, so why are major publications like The New York Times covering this data? Evidently Google’s market share dropped five percent, in contrast to MSN’s market share that raised 5 percent. On a normal day where celebrities are going in and out of jail, rehab or morgues, slight shifts in the search engine world would not matter, but unfortunately for Google there was no real news yesterday. Should this statistic alarm advertisers and shareholders? Not at all, but it does pose the question: how did MSN marginally improve?

There are two reasons the Times article gives for the movement, one of which is the fact that Nielsen/NetRatings have restructured their site measurements to put more of an emphasis on the time a user spends on a website, rather than just the amount of page views. Another reason that may have drawn the masses (4.8% technically) to MSN was their new service, or rather—giveaway: Live Search Club. For its second month’s installment the Live Search Club seems to be working as planned. Members join the search club and earn points through the amount of games played, and with these points or ‘tickets’ can purchase Microsoft products. Roughly playing 1.78 games earns you a ticket; so play 934 games and earn five free songs, or play 35,600 games and earn yourself a free Zune, remember Zunes? Boy that takes me back.

Not to take anything away from this marketing tool that creates a higher volume of searches—but it’s been done before. Like Live Search Club, Blingo and iWon worked great the first few months, but then steadily dropped off the map after members remembered their children had been at soccer practice for a month. Historically Live Search Club does not stand a chance, online giveaways work sub par at best, but due to the complete coincidence that MSN’s search volume rose while Google’s declined has caused some eyebrows to raise. I’d keep those eyebrows down however, unless of course Microsoft Network starts shelling out real prizes, like iPods, or algorithms.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 1:15 pm by cobo and is filed under Austin, Blogging, Google, MSN, Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.