Don Dodge talks about discrepancies in reports of search market share. Apparently, Google has an estimated ~45% market share of search queries (according to ComScore), but many site owners see more than 70% of their search referrals coming from Google.
Why such a big discrepancy? Don speculates:
Search referrals are different than number of searches performed. Rich, Jeremy, and I are measuring search referrals to our sites, versus market share for the number of total searches performed. You have to ask yourself, how important are searches that didn’t lead to a referral? Meaning, the searcher didn’t actually click on a result.
Sounds to me like a very Microsftian way to asking this question… isn’t the real reason this –
The quality of Google’s search results is superior to the other engines, thus for every X queries conducted a lot more clicks/referrals (=good search results) occur on Google than do on the competing engines…
Am I missing anything?…