Global Searches: India not in top 10
By Bala Shah

American net monitoring firm comScore describes itself as “a global leader in measuring the digital world. In an independent survey of 800 of the most influential publishers, advertising agencies and advertisers conducted Jan 2009, comScore was rated the ' most preferred online audience measurement service' by 50% of respondents”

Apparently, this comScore rating was a full 25 points ahead of its nearest competitor. comScore's capabilities are based on a massive, global cross-section of approximately 2 million Internet users who have given comScore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing. comScore panelists also participate in survey research that gathers and integrates their attitudes and intentions. Its clients include AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, BBC and many more blue chip companies.

There was a time when Alexa was quoted as gospel in India till it turned out that their methodology needed fine tuning.  Now it seems that comScore may have been supplying wrong figures to many of its clients till recently, but has now improved the collection and reporting process. How wrong? All Things Digital is reporting: “ComScore’s old data, for instance, say the Huffington Post attracted 9.95 million unique visitors in December. But its new numbers peg HuffPo’s December traffic at 20 million uniques.”

Hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising revenue have been spent based on ComScore figures.  If the ComScore new methodology has doubled the figures for a prominent American news site, it shows that most figures till 2009 were not grounded in fact.  And till there is a general consensus on the accuracy of comScore net numbers, even the current figures should be treated with due caution.

To add insult to injury, comScore is now telling its publishing clients that they need to pay an extra $10,000 if they want the new corrected figure.  Apparently, if you pay the old rate you will get figures generated using the old half baked methodology.

Today, comScore released a report to the media about how the global search market grew by 46 percent in 2009. According to comScore ‘the total worldwide search market boasted more than 131 billion searches conducted by people age 15 or older from home and work locations in December 2009, representing a 46-percent increase in the past year. This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute. The U.S. represented the largest individual search market in the world with 22.7 billion searches, or approximately 17 percent of searches conducted globally. China ranked second with 13.3 billion searches, followed by Japan with 9.2 billion and the U.K. with 6.2 billion. Among the top ten global search markets, Russia posted the highest gains in 2009, growing 92 percent to 3.3 billion, followed by France (up 61 percent to 5.4 billion) and Brazil (up 53 percent to 3.8 billion)’.

While this comScore report may be correct about market leaders like USA, China and Japan, it is surprising that countries like Canada make it to the list while India is not in the top 10.

The public can only consider a report credible if it also explains in detail the methodology used to collect the stats from countries like India.