Advertising network Chitika has released some surprising search engine statistics today, putting Microsoft Bing ahead of long-time runner-up Yahoo in the number two spot behind (still dominant) Google.
While other services, like StatCounter have the two engines neck in neck, Chitika’s latest stats put Bing ahead of Yahoo by 4.5%.
Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan took a look at Chitika’s numbers, noting that most every other U.S. rating service still shows Yahoo as ahead of Bing and that something must be going on. According to Chitika’s numbers, Bing has been ahead of Yahoo for several months now, while every other service shows that Yahoo leads Bing, if not narrowly, then by several percentage points.
While other rating services rate traffic according to the number of searches performed on a given search engine, Chitika measures traffic according to hits that reach members of its advertising network. Sullivan concludes that the disparity must come in how traffic reaches Chitika and likely not in how much the individual engines are actually used, noting that “less of that traffic is ‘escaping’ out of Yahoo and to third-party web sites such as those in Chitika’s network.”
If that’s true, then it might really mean something in the search engine battle. What does it mean to have more searches but not have that traffic escape your own network? Even if all these other ratings services find Bing as taking a smaller piece of the search engine pie, is their piece more valuable because it gets around more?
