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Comment by brymaster | Hacker News Reader

I don't doubt that Yahoo has a shit load of traffic still, but unless Alexa/Quantcast/ComScore/Compete/Nielsen or any of these other so-called 'web traffic measurement services' have direct access to Yahoo and Google's traffic data (they don't), I'd take these all with a grain of salt. These services have never been accurate.

http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-comp...

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And Quantcast* disagrees pretty strongly: https://www.quantcast.com/google.com vs https://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com. This is only traffic to yahoo.com and google.com, though, leaving out youtube, flickr, and various other domains, but it's likely that's what comscore is measuring on the google side. Given that Youtube's reach is nearly as high as Google.com's, that's probably not helping Yahoo.

* Disclaimer, I work there

Your links are looking at just google.com vs yahoo.com. The cnet article is referring to web properties owned by google vs properties owned by yahoo.

If anything I think we should read this as "Users with a browser toolbar installed are more likely to use yahoo"

Common attitude to Comscore numbers in the Web industry is yes, their data is off, but they're under-/over-counting everyone more or less equally, so relative positions and growth numbers are generally correct.

With that said, mobile used to be Comscore's Achilles heel, not sure if they're started buying click data from mobile ISPs to rectify that. Gmail is leading US email client, and Gmail Mobile combined with Google Maps might make Google the largest mobile property.

One of those things is not like the other.

Go to yahoo.com, open devtools/firebug, scour the network tab for "b.scorecardresearch.com", that's comscore. These numbers are as accurate as can be.

The numbers for Yahoo may be accurate. What about Google and all the others on the list? When I go to Google, I see no "b.scorecardresearch" anywhere to be found on my network tab.

From - comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2009/5/comScore_Announced_Media_Metrix_360

"The new approach combines person-level measurement from comScore's proprietary 2 million person global panel with Web site server metrics in order to account for 100 percent of a Web site's audience."

It's possible that Yahoo and Google are providing server metrics via javascript tagging to comScore. That would give them direct access to the traffic data. I believe that Quantcast and maybe Nielsen both offer something similar as well.

"It's possible that Yahoo and Google are providing server metrics via javascript tagging to comScore."

Your suggestion is essentially that Yahoo and Google are providing non-public data from which revenue growth/etc can almost be calculated, to outside companies?

The incentive is ad dollars. Ad companies want third party verification.

Google runs all their own advertising. They have no need for third party verification.

That explains why debaserab2 was able to find b.scorecardresearch for Yahoo, but not Google.

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