Explicit Search Versus Search Share: Market Share Depends on How You Count

As with many other things in life, how one counts affects the results. The same thing is true with measures of search share: how one counts makes a difference.

One can count Google slideshows, contextual search in places like Yahoo News, and Google Instant, or one can count only search terms entered into search boxes.

Using the former technique, every time you go through a slideshow on Yahoo, for instance, related search results appear below, inflating the numbers.

The latter approach strips out those numbers to come up with what it calls “explicit search,” which counts only those searches triggered when someone actually types a query into a search box.