The Business Insider is proclaiming that “Bing Crushes Yahoo Again in November”, based on numbers released by comScore for November search-engine performance. But do the numbers reported support this bold statement of success and failure?

According to comScore, search-engine market share broke down like this: Google, 65.6%; Yahoo, 17.5%; Bing, 10.3%; Ask Network, 3.8%; and AOL, 2.8%. (AOL still exists?) This seems to indicate that Yahoo and Bing still occupy the same ordinal ranks they did in October. A little closer, perhaps, but that’s about it. And, if anything, both were crushed by Google.

Maybe it’s the change from October to November that’s the cause for the hyperbole? Google was up 0.2 percentage points, Yahoo down 0.5 percentage points, and Bing up 0.4 percentage points. Yeah, Yahoo lost ground in November, and Bing gained, but the shifts don’t seem all that dramatic. And when you consider year-to-year (Y/Y) differences, Yahoo seems about the same place it was a year ago, with its "core search volume" up 1.1%. Bing is new to the market, so it showed a more dramatic 46% Y/Y increase (even though Bing isn’t yet a year old).

Still, trends for Yahoo seem pointed down, having fallen from a 20.1% market share in May to 17.5% in November, while Bing rose from 8.0% to 10.3%. Percentage-wise those differences may be meaningful. Maybe that justifies the hand-wringing over Yahoo and back-slapping for Bing.

Before getting too excited about the impending demise of Yahoo, it would be nice to see revenue figures for it and Bing. After all, it’s not the number of people using the service that really matters, it’s how much you make off those people that counts.

If only total dupes fall for click-through advertising on search result pages, and users of Microsoft products are the most likely to click-through, does that mean users of Microsoft products are total dupes? Logically fallacy aside, Microsoft product users might be total dupes, but not for this particular reason.

Chitika, which researches search-targeted advertising, reports that users of Microsoft products are more likely than others to click an ad on a search result page. For example, users of Bing are 75% more likely to click an ad than users of Google. And users of Internet Explorer are 50% more likely than Safari users, and 80% more likely than Chrome users to click an ad. Overall, Windows users are twice as likely as Linux and Mac users to click an ad.

So users of Microsoft products are gullible dupes--easy prey for the mavens of click-through advertising, right? Hardly. In this case the percentage differences are accurate, but the actual click-through rates for all platforms are so low the differences are probably meaningless. For example, 99.85% of Internet Explorer users don’t click-through, compared with 99.34% of Firefox users, 99.50% of Safari users, and 99.79% of Chrome users. In other words, percentage-wise, hardly anyone, regardless of browser, clicks-through. The pattern for operating systems is similar--in all three cases: Windows, Linux, and Mac, more than 99% don’t click-through.

Given the general nature of Microsoft product users--in all fairness it’s a lot more diverse a population than Linux or Mac users--Microsoft product users seem to be doing pretty well in these relative comparisons. Furthermore, there’s nothing here to suggest they are any more or less susceptible to click-through ads than anyone else.

The Internet is all a blur, to be sure, but it’s not a realtime blur. Searches, for example, prowl through databases of constantly complied and updated information, which means there’s always a disconnect, albeit a small one, between what you see and what is actually out there. Google announced plans to eliminate that gap with something it calls the “realtime web.”

The key to realtime is relevancy, and according to Google Fellow Amit Singhal, presenting at Google’s Search Event, Google’s relevance technology has matured to the point where realtime is possible. According to Singhal, “the importance of relevance has gone through the roof as the amount of information out there is growing. Relevance has become the critical factor.”  MG Siegler, of TechCrunch, reports a demonstration by Singhal showing hits on freshly available information, even from Twitter.

Right now English is the only language realtime is available for. But Google plans to expand the number of languages to ensure relevancy remains intact. Other languages are expected to be incorporated by the first quarter of 2010.

Google’s realtime searches will include not only Twitter, but blog posts, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Facebook. Searches can be performed not only on PCs, but iPhones and Android devices.

You can try out the realtime web at Google Trends. Click on any “hot topic.” On the search results page look for the entry “Latest results for...”

The pay-to-play debate for online media content heated up a bit with the announcement by News Corp. that Rupert Murdoch was reading to pull the plug on Google’s access to its online content. Jonathan Miller, the chief digital officer of News Corp. told the Monaco Media Forum “We believe that the value of high quality content is not recognized online so something needs to happen.” That something, according to Miller, will not happen right away, but in “months or quarters.”

Murdoch has long made it known that he deserves compensation for the content he provides online, and is actively pursuing ways to generate revenue more directly than advertising. The Wall Street Journal, for example, requires paid subscription for full access (although there are ways around this). However, the online market hasn’t been kind to those who put up such barriers. Apparently Murdoch believes that a leader is needed to make the first bold move, after which others will follow. “We will lead. There is a pent up need for this,” said Miller. There is also a pent up need for News Corp. to get its hands on a bit of the advertising revenue Google’s search engines generate, and which News Corp doesn’t share in.

Miller was dismissive of Google’s importance, at least for the News Corp.: “The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.”

Google’s response was as expected: “Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don't.”

Whether News Corp can survive without Google is a question only pulling the plug will answer. It remains to be seen if News Corp. will follow through on their threat.