Rand, I thought one of the providers (Hitwise or Comscore) started to separate out internal v. external links. Perhaps those were just pure links, like when a link at MSN.com went to a search results page?
I also don't get the Facebook reference. Google has distribution deals - Google searches in Firefox still count for Google, for example. Is it just the fact that web results are at the tail of the page?
I think you're correct that Comscore controls for/removes links to searches (like Bing's news links) but not for the queries done "in network" (at least, not that I'm aware of).
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Rand, I thought one of the providers (Hitwise or Comscore) started to separate out internal v. external links. Perhaps those were just pure links, like when a link at MSN.com went to a search results page?
I also don't get the Facebook reference. Google has distribution deals - Google searches in Firefox still count for Google, for example. Is it just the fact that web results are at the tail of the page?
I think you're correct that Comscore controls for/removes links to searches (like Bing's news links) but not for the queries done "in network" (at least, not that I'm aware of).