No. I cited it as evidence that until a little over a year ago, before the loss of Yahoo, Google was alleged to account for 80% of Internet searches, the exact same figure you said you’d “never” heard associated with Google’s share of Internet searches.

“But how could the author have been confused by that information when the next sentence specifically states that their popularity is down considerably?”

I don’t think, and didn’t think, that the specific USA Today article cited was the Wired writer’s source. That source could have been any of a number of other articles written before Yahoo dumped Google that mentioned the 80% figure. For example, it could have been the article in USA Today’s 2/1/2004 issue that said: “Companies pay because about 80 percent of Internet searches are performed with Google technology, says online newsletter Search Engine Watch.”

Of course, if the Wired writer had been confused by the 4/30/2004 USA Today article, it would have been no stranger than you reading my original post (#1) that specifically mentioned that “Yahoo dumped Google” and turning right around (in post #4) and informing me that “Yahoo! doesn’t use Google anymore”!

I’m missing the interesting part of me not citing that. The sentence that I did cite specifically stated that the 80% figure was for the period before the loss of their major affiliate.

One common activity for those writing and selling articles is to repurpose and repackage the same article for different publications. In some respects, the collection of sources and research is proprietary information, and it possesses a value itself independent of a single article. If I’m writing a magazine article and it gets published, as a writer, I want to be able to take my content and try and sell different versions to others. If a complete bibliography is posted with my article, I’m giving up a competitive advantage that I have created for myself by filtering sources to arrive at a useful set. Another writer may simply take my sources and use those to sell a similar article to a publication that I may have been targeting.

Of course, this is the only reason I know for keeping all sources confidential. (The writer in this case may simply be lazy. Who knows?) Given the different nature of the magazine article market than that of the academic “market”, different values and considerations prevail. In the magazine world, the reader is not expected to fact-check the writer (and editors), so lists of citations have less value than in the academic world. In the academic realm, a little more responsibility is placed on the reader.

I share in your concern of an unverified fact taking a life of its own. I’m honestly surprised that it might be acceptable for an academic paper could cite a magazine article as a source. Those writing magazine articles and those writing journal articles are motivated by very different factors, and it’s useful to have some sort of virtual firewall between the two.

Hmmm … it really depends. I do track this for my website.

Google is certainly the greatest single named source of referrals. Though there are a lot of hits where the referral can’t be determined. Aggregators and crawlers take up a lot of the traffic for my site (as well as blog-spammers).

I’d say Google has definitely lost market share from what it once was. But quantifying the exact amount isn’t trivial.

There was speculation that they were using a different definition of “systems administrator” than the rest of the industry, or perhaps that was a pre-IPO salary which was accompanied by a nice chunk of stock, now worth $millions.

My sense is that Wired Magazine has maintained higher standards than Wired News. It’s of course easier to be rigorous on a monthly magazine than a news site that publishes on a reasonably constant basis.

My own goddamn site gets way too many of its links from msn and aol searches.I don’t know what algorithm they use but a majority of the searches are useless and off-topic.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Nat – Interestingly, you didn’t cite the sentence following the one you quoted from the USA Today article: “Now, it’s down to 49.7%, says ComScore Media Metrix.” They cite comScore, but it would be nice to see how they come up with these figures. The Economist does a better job of explaining how it came up with it. Finally, if that was the explanation for the Wired author’s comment then I would have mentioned it as the source to which he had referred me when responding to my query.

Perhaps I was being too cryptic. Yes, the data I posted was old. It acknowledges its own oldness with the phrase: “Before Yahoo dumped Google”. My “old data?” question was whether that is the simple explanation for the Wired writer’s mistake. And when you said that you had “never seen figures suggesting that Google (with or without affiliates) accounts for 80 percent of all searches”, I was wondering if “never” meant, well, never.

I don’t know the correct percentage of Google’s market share or where to find this information. It is certainly less than 80% since Yahoo dropped them. And I don’t think anyone ever claimed it was that high outside the United States.