Comparison of Search Share, September and October 2009
by Jon Peltier
Monday, November 30th, 2009
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
The Marketing Charts blog compared Google to the rest of the world in Online Search Share, September 2009 & October 2009. The “guidelines” were followed: for parts of a whole, use a pie chart. And for comparison, why not two pies side by side?
Well, as Edward Tufte once said, “The only thing worse than a pie chart is several of them.” Especially in this case. If not for the different titles and the percentage data labels, I would think someone had goofed and used the same graphic twice.
Having to read the numbers off the chart to make comparisons defeats the purpose of graphing the data, but is not as efficient as a table, because the numbers are strewn about the visual field. I can see that Google takes up most of both pies, but I can only estimate that Google’s take is about 2/3 of either pie.
So what are we trying to show here? If we want to show how each search engine’s share changed, a clustered column chart is good, because the two bars for each company are adjacent, for easy comparison.
It’s easy to see that Google and Microsoft both went up slightly, and Yahoo went down. And nobody’s really concerned with AOL or Ask, are they?
An alternative to the column chart is a line chart. I shaded the plot area light gray, so it’s obvious that even though Google is way up here and the rest are way down there, all are part of the same chart.
Again, it’s clear that although the changes were rather small, Google and Microsoft both gained at the expense of Yahoo.
What if it’s the change itself that we want to show? Again, a column chart fits the bill.
There are a lot of options when you’re selecting the chart type. You need to decide what you want to show in your chart, then select an appropriate graphic that shows it. As usual, it’s not a bad move to select from the array of 2D line and bar charts.
And I had too much pie over the Thanksgiving weekend. They call it a long weekend, when a more accurate phrase would be wide weekend.
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Posted: Monday, November 30th, 2009 under Chart Busters.
Comments: 10
Comments
Comment from Daniel
Time: Monday, November 30, 2009, 3:38 am
…the last column chart with the relative changes in percentages is rather misleading, absolute changes in percentage points would be much more useful!
Comment from Ed Ferrero
Time: Monday, November 30, 2009, 3:48 am
I would have said that Google and Microsoft both increased their share by half a percent, and Yahoo dropped by 0.8%.
So something like this chart
http://www.edferrero.com/content/chart001.png
would be more appropriate rather than your last chart. As a rule, I am wary of charting ‘acceleration’ measures, i.e. the percent change in a percent measure.
Comment from Mike Woodhouse
Time: Monday, November 30, 2009, 5:53 am
I wonder what we’d see if we looked at twelve months’ data? Are the Sept-Oct changes significant or are they within the variance for a longer timescale. absent any other information, I have to assume the latter, especially considering the marketing source of the “data”.
Must have been a slow news day.
Comment from Mike Woodhouse
Time: Monday, November 30, 2009, 6:14 am
OK, ten minutes’ Googling and I have Oct-08 to Oct-09:
‘Month’,'Google’,'Yahoo!’,'Microsoft’,'AOL’,'Ask’
‘01 Oct 2008′,63.1,20.5,8.5,3.7,4.2
‘01 Nov 2008′,63.5,20.4,8.3,3.8,4.0
‘01 Dec 2008′,63.5,20.5,8.3,3.8,3.9
‘01 Jan 2009′,63.5,21.0,8.5,3.9,3.7
‘01 Feb 2009′,63.3,20.6,8.2,3.9,4.1
‘01 Mar 2009′,63.7,20.5,8.3,3.7,3.8
‘01 Apr 2009′,64.2,20.4,8.2,3.4,3.8
‘01 May 2009′,65.0,20.1,8.0,3.1,3.9
‘01 Jun 2009′,65.0,19.6,8.4,3.1,3.9
‘01 Jul 2009′,64.7,19.3,8.9,3.1,3.9
‘01 Aug 2009′,64.6,19.3,9.3,3.0,3.9
‘01 Sep 2009′,64.9,18.8,9.4,3.0,3.9
‘01 Oct 2009′,65.4,18.0,9.9,3.0,3.9
…which shows that Google have shown a steady increase, Microsoft Bing (and possibly the release of IE8) has increased their share and Yahoo! are suffering. All over the last year only. Even more interesting would be the total size of the search market over that period: is anyone gaining/losing in total number of eyeballs?
Lazy reporting/blogging, worse charting.
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Monday, November 30, 2009, 9:21 am
Ed, Mike -
Thanks for the two good points you’ve raised: what’s the expected (or typical) variability, and how do we present this variability.
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Monday, November 30, 2009, 9:34 am
Mike -
Thanks for providing the data for the whole year.
In fact, shortening the time axis helps show the trends more clearly:
Comment from Ed Ferrero
Time: Monday, November 30, 2009, 8:04 pm
So, we are into analysis now. For the year to date data I would show the cumulative change in percent share from a reference date. In the chart below, I have picked Dec 08 as the reference date, so I am showing the change in share in Jan, Feb, etc.
http://www.edferrero.com/content/chart002.png
As it is the colours do not add anything to the chart, except maybe some confusion. I could have changed the colours from Excel’s defaults, but I am too lazy. Perhaps I will write some code to do this easily – Excel 07s nasty GUI makes it too tedious.
As Mike points out, the size of the search market has also grown during the period (Oct 09 total searches are 18.5% greater than Dec 08). We should probably show this on a separate chart to give a true picture. Again, I am lazy.
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Tuesday, December 1, 2009, 12:04 am
So as search volume increases, Google’s and Bing’s shares increase. So people who are making more and more searches (are they more savvy?) are using Google and Bing. The people who are not increasing their searches are using Yahoo and (he-he) AOL. Or am I making too many assumptions.
I would have tried this panel chart as a line chart as well. No need to mess with shades of colors….
Comment from Ed Ferrero
Time: Tuesday, December 1, 2009, 1:21 am
The numbers could also mean that Google and Bing users are clicking the search button more often because they can’t find what they want the first time.
Whereas Yahoo users…
Pingback from How Succinctly Can I Explain Why Pie Charts Are Evil? | Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson
Time: Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 10:02 am
[...] catching up on some blog reading yesterday morning and seeing an excellent example of pie chart alternatives from Jon Peltier, and then watching seven presentations yesterday, six of which used the same basic presentation [...]
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