It can be a bit of a balancing act when reports concerning the search market come out; if comScore, Experian Hitwise, and Nielsen all say different things, it’s embarrassing to have three contradictory headlines.  New numbers from Experian Hitwise tend to agree with yesterday’s comScore stats in asserting that November was a good month for Bing, however.

comScore said Google’s market share went down, Yahoo’s went down, and Bing’s went up.  Experian Hitwise found that Google’s share went down, Yahoo’s went up, and Bing’s also increased a bit.

More specifically, Google’s share decreased from 70.68 percent to 70.10 percent between October and November, according to the newer report.  Yahoo’s share rose from 14.72 percent to 15.17 percent, and Bing eked out enough of a gain to expand its market share from 10.04 percent to 10.10 percent.

That puts the Bing-Yahoo alliance up in comparison to Google, which is an important achievement for the two organizations.

Experian Hitwise also observed in a statement, "Yahoo! Search and Bing achieved the highest success rates in November 2010, meaning that for both search engines, 81 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a Website.  Google achieved a success rate of 65 percent, up 5 percent over the previous month.  The share of unsuccessful searches highlights the opportunity for both the search engines and marketers to evaluate the search engine result pages to ensure that searchers are finding the information they are seeking."

For simplicity’s sake, let’s hope the Nielsen report more or less agrees with these findings.