Google has an advantage in mindshare in that it's effectively the "default" search engine on the web, but its population is still, to a degree, self-selecting. Whether this effect is pronounced enough to skew the data, I can't say.
Google has an advantage in mindshare in that it's effectively the "default" search engine on the web, but its population is still, to a degree, self-selecting. Whether this effect is pronounced enough to skew the data, I can't say.
I guess that implicit in the article is the assumption that this self-selection effect hasn't changed much in the last 4-8 years. The author is careful to stick with like-to-like comparisons.
If on the other hand there is a trend away from Google among certain groups then that would seem to be a problem for Google's branding team! Perhaps there is a market here for a left-wary search engine, say DDG hooked up to conservapedia instead of wikipedia at the backend?