February is always a weird month for search data.
It’s a short month. Query volume is always down. And this year was particularly odd with all the snowstorms. Were people on the Internet more or less as a result?
An interesting note in comScore’s rankings for last month is that Facebook search query was actually UP. So, there’s one thing people like to do when it snows. (I think we all knew that already by the sheer number of snow pictures uploaded by people in our network.)
Facebook, of course, dominated Christmas and New Year’s. It’s really becoming the go-to place on the web, as I’m sure they wish it to be.
Whether Bing’s 0.2% increase in search market share came as a result of the boost in Facebook remains to be seen. But Yahoo! lost 0.2% so they really just evened out. The search deal between the two companies may not be implemented yet, but as long as Bing is only stealing share from Yahoo!, their gains are pointless.
