Latest Stats as at 19/5/2012. ============================ These figures cover the 15-day period 1/5/2012 to 15/5/2012. Increased effort this month has marked thousands of rubbish hits which are excluded from the figures below. China and the Ukraine are especially annoying, but there are plenty more, with annoying people scattered around the world. And some rather ominous behaviour from Google, explained below in the Search Engines section. Operating System Market Share ============================== For the period 1st to 15th May, these percentage figures are based on visits, with earlier figures in brackets:- Windows-7 32.7 (34.4, 32.3, 34.3, 34.7, 33.7, 32.1, 31.7, 31.4) XP 24.6 (25.0, 19.7, 23.7, 23.9, 24.5, 25.9, 25.6, 24.0, 23.6) Vista 6.6 (6.4, 7.7, 7.4, 7.3, 7.5, 7.6, 8.2, 8.3, 8.7, 8.9) Pre-XP Windows 0.8 (1.0, 1.0, 1.1, 1.3, 1.2, 1.4, 1.2, 0.9) Mac 12.1 (11.4, 12.6, 12.5, 12.4, 12.3, 12.5, 11.6, 11.7, 11.8) iPhone etc 16.0 (15.8, 19.4, 14.4, 13.9, 14.1, 13.8, 14.7, 16.7) Android 3.3 (3.0, 3.4, 2.9, 2.7, 2.8, 2.6, 2.7, 3.0, 3.1, 2.0) Other Mobiles 2.9 (2.4, 2.9, 2.9, 3.0, 3.3, 3.5, 3.2, 3.6, 3.1) Linux 0.8 (0.6, 1.1, 0.8, 0.8, 1.0, 0.8, 0.8, 0.8, 0.9, 0.8) Macs and iPhones are holding their place. One would expect Android to be gaining on Apple, but this is not happening. The religious frenzy surrounding Apple's products was shown this week on ABC-TV in a British documentary. People were queued up all night for the opening of a new Apple store, and one chap interviewed had been to 30 such openings. The total sample size above was 17028. Browser Breakup =============== Percentages of visits for the period 1st to 15th May 2012:- IE 35.4 (36.2, 30.3, 36.1, 36.7, 34.8, 35.8, 35.5, 33.1, 31.7) Safari 24.8 (24.1, 28.3, 23.7, 23.1, 23.3, 25.1, 25.6, 28.0) Chrome 21.1 (20.7, 21.5, 20.8, 21.0, 20.9, 18.1, 17.5, 17.6) FF 15.1 (15.6, 16.2, 15.7, 15.5, 17.0, 16.4, 17.0, 17.3, 17.9) Opera 1.9 (1.9, 2.0, 2.2, 2.2, 2.2, 2.4, 2.2, 1.9, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4) All Others 1.8 (1.4, 1.9, 1.5, 1.6, 1.8, 2.2, 2.2, 2.1, 2.3, 1.8) When compared with previous results, the long term trend is Chrome and Safari up, Internet Explorer and Firefox down. It's very clear that the growth in Chrome is at the expense of Firefox. On Windows 7, Chrome is preferred over Firefox by a substantial margin. On mobile phones, Firefox barely gets a mention. Chrome is tops on Android phones, and Safari rules on iPhones and iPads. The sample size was 17094 visits by humans. Search Engines Share ==================== Percentage breakup of visits coming via search engines for May 1st to 15th, 2012:- Google 88.6 (89.0, 90.2, 89.7, 90.2, 90.6, 91.0, 91.2, 91.8) Bing 3.6 (3.5, 3.2, 3.8, 3.6, 3.3, 3.2, 3.0, 2.7, 3.1, 3.1) Yahoo 3.1 (3.5, 3.3, 3.4, 3.2, 3.1, 2.9, 2.8, 2.7, 3.1, 2.9 All others 4.8 (3.9, 3.3, 3.1, 3.0, 2.9, 3.0, 2.9, 2.8, 2.8) A further gain for the "Others" category, compared with Yahoo and Bing. It appears from the above percentages that Google has started to decline. A very good explanation has been found for these figures. Google has started to return an empty string for the search, plus a long encrypted string containing the actual search string that everyone on the planet who analyses server log files wants to see. Google says this is for privacy reasons, but I have read that if you join the premium analytics plan and pay, then you can see these strings. A few months back I noticed that my search string extractor programme was failing, and I assumed it was just occasional glitches, or non-search activities such as page-translation by Google. The actual situation is vastly different. If you search for "Google referrer string specification" you will find many web pages explaining what's going on. The above percentages are based on a sample size of 10281 searches all containing a valid search string and a valid search engine. This includes 9106 searches done through Google. But the empty searches from Google now number 1564, with the encrypted search string added to each for good measure. When the market-share figures are re-calculated with these 1564 included, Google's market share jumps from 88.6% to 90.1% which means Google has not declined at all, they are just being evil. ================================ ===============================