Got Ads?
2/16/2006
  Google VP Peter Norvig Clues Us In
A while back I was irritated at the press for blithely citing idiotic Nielsen and comScore data on Google traffic.

Here's what I wrote:

Comscore reports around 5B total searches/month in the US across all search engines in July 2005.

...

However, I think comScore and Nielsen are wrong in these estimates. Not wrong by a little, but wrong by a lot. And it throws into question a lot of the analysis that people do about Google and the search engines.

...

Of course, both Yahoo and Google subscribe to these services. I wonder what they think of the accuracy of these reports?

Well, now we know what Google Director of Research Peter Norvig (he's someone who would know) thinks of the accuracy of those numbers. Not much. Take a look at this article lambasting the typical journalist's math skills on Norvig's "blog".

Peter writes:

Finally, another report on Nielsen/NetRatings says that "The activity at more than 60 search sites makes up the total search volume upon which percentages are based -- 5.1 billion searches in this month." Of these, Google gets a 46.3% share of the searches. 46.3% of 5.1 billion is 2.4 billion, so Nielsen/NetRatings (as quoted by these two reporters) is saying that each Google search results in 7,000 clicks.

Exercise for the reader: is the Nielsen/NetRatings estimate of 2.4 billion Google searches per month (which translates to 80 million per day) accurate? Consider research such as ["million google searches per day"] and note the year those estimates were made.

In case you are too lazy or disinclined to do the math, (Norvig would say you'd do fine as a typical journalist), he's implying that those numbers are way off.

Thank you from me to Peter Norvig. I only wish I didn't have to steal bartnagel.com's bandwidth to put up a picture to display of him in one of his loud shirts. Oh what the hell, Norvig probably has $546M in Google cash lying around, and he's stealing bandwidth from Bart, so maybe I'm ok...

 




<< Home

Subscribe to GotAds?



Links



Recent Posts

Google VP Peter Norvig Clues Us In


Archives

February 2005 /  March 2005 /  April 2005 /  May 2005 /  June 2005 /  July 2005 /  August 2005 /  September 2005 /  October 2005 /  November 2005 /  December 2005 /  January 2006 /  February 2006 /  March 2006 /  April 2006 /  May 2006 /  June 2006 /  July 2006 /  August 2006 /  September 2006 /  October 2006 /  November 2006 /  December 2006 /  January 2007 /  February 2007 /  March 2007 /  April 2007 /  May 2007 /  June 2007 /  July 2007 /  August 2007 /  September 2007 /  October 2007 /  November 2007 /  December 2007 /  January 2008 /  February 2008 /  March 2008 /  April 2008 /  May 2008 /  June 2008 /  July 2008 /  August 2008 /  September 2008 /  November 2008 /  December 2008 /  January 2009 /  March 2009 /