Compete ups stats: Y! up from 13.3% to 19%

Wow! I'm proud to see my finding a regex bug helped Compete correct its stats and set the record right for Yahoo!. As a result Yahoo! Search marketshare is now ~19%, which is up from the wrong percentage of 13.3%. Yahoo! surely needs some positive buzz at this point than any other. That too this one they have the right to.

I'm happy for my alma mater (aka ex-employer). At the same time, I'm mildly disappointed that neither Danny (@SearchEngineLand) nor Jeremy (@Compete) chose to acknowledge me by name or link to my post. Even other commenters have felt so. Glad that Webpronews managed to dig the link out from my comment at Danny's post.

Edit: Compete has linked to my post now. Max from Compete has commented below saying that they meant to give credit to me. Thanks guys.

Compete admits bug, says they'll recount

[Update: Compete ups stats: Y! up from 13.3% to 19%]

Steve from Compete has posted a comment confirming that their regex did have the bug pointed out by me. He, however, added that for capturing clicks on result pages, they use other regexes which don't have such a bug. He assured that they'll do a recount and update their numbers. I don't know how much difference it'll make to search engine market share numbers. But, any increase will do good for Yahoo!, I suppose.

Confirmed: Yahoo! does get screwed by a regex bug

[Update: Compete has confirmed that it was a bug.]
[Context: My previous post]
I had earlier suspected that Yahoo! Searches are severely undercounted by Compete because of a regex bug. Now, my suspicion has been confirmed. Danny Sullivan of the SearchEngineLand has confirmed that those regexes were indeed given by Compete.

By some estimates, refinement queries constitute over 70%? of the total queries. Is Compete, a widely quoted stats provider, undercounting Yahoo! Searches by 70%?OK, in a hurry, I might've dramatised the impact, but some significant chunk of searches are undercounted. Doesn't it amount to a huuuuuuuuge difference to Yahoo!'s market valuation?Well, I hear that other Stats are more widely quoted than Compete.

And when Larry Wall wondered whether a Perl bug could cause the next Wall Street crash, he must have been only half-joking!

Yahoo! getting screwed by a regex bug?

[Update: Yes, Compete says it was a bug.]
I hope not!

SearchEngineLand says Compete uses the following regex to count the number of Yahoo! searches:

^/search\?(.*&)?p=[^&]+

It actually excludes a vast number of searches that uses Yahoo! link tracking parameter.
For example, a search that I made from my Firefox searchbox has the following url:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Perl&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz2

No issue here. But, when I refine the query by adding "language" in the search box in the results page, following is the url:

http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu6Xv_FhIOyoBokNXNyoA
?p=Perl+language&y=Search&fr=moz2&ei=UTF-8

Anybody who has worked with regexes can see that this url and scores of similar urls of query refinement won't match the regex supposedly used by Compete and hence not counted! And, all this while, Yahoo! stock keeps taking a beat for failing in Search. If true, it could be a multimillion dollar bug.

Anybody from Yahoo!, Compete who can confirm or deny this?

Meta: If you're posting this, link back to this post, please.