Yahoo said Wednesday that it is misleading to include Google Instant results in search engine market share reports.
"I'd argue that with this type of counting, third party measurement companies are potentially misleading the consumers of their data," Shashi Seth, senior vice president of Yahoo Search and Marketplaces, wrote in a blog post.
Seth's post comes after comScore released its September search engine numbers; the first such report to be released since the debut of Google Instant, which shows users search results as they type. ComScore said Wednesday that it has "developed a priority scoring system" to make sure it does not count search results that a user did not actually conduct, but Seth was skeptical.
"For example, I want to find Sprinkles Cupcakes. When I start typing 'S-P,' Google Instant offers up 'Sprint,' unrelated to what I was looking for. However, this would count as a search in comScore's measurements," Seth wrote. "Going further and typing 'S-P-R-I,' I still see a suggestion for 'Sprint,' not quite what I had in mind. In the mean time, this counts as another search. If I typed slower, more searches would be counted."
ComScore said that when people type something into Google, hit "enter," and then click on a link, it counts that activity in its "explicit core search" results. Results that show up in Google Instant as someone types will be included in "total core search" results if a user pauses on that for at least three seconds, comScore said.
In total core search – which includes Google Instant – Google Sites increased 2.4 percent to 62.9 percent in September. Yahoo dipped 1.8 percent to 19.2 percent, followed by Microsoft's Bing at 12.5 percent, a 0.3 percent drop.
In explicit core searches, Google increased 0.7 percent to 66.1 percent, Yahoo dropped 0.7 percent to 16.7 percent, and Bing increased 0.1 percent to 11.2 percent.
"Looking at comScore's report, it appears to me that a majority of Google's query growth in September (a month in which Google Instant was live for 20 days) came from precisely these kinds of [Instant] interactions," Seth wrote. "I bet even the folks at Google are mystified by this kind of accounting."
Seth pushed for "ways to more accurately measure searches in the long term, so that all of the players in the industry can focus on driving innovation that will ultimately benefit consumers and advertisers alike."
Earlier this month, Yahoo revamped its search engine to focus on more relevant, entertainment-centric results. Seth said the company has since "seen engagement increases on Yahoo Search," though he did not elaborate.