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...the end for their dominance, blah blah blah. Then Silicon Alley Insider posited that students spend less time on their computers in December, therefore its only natural that Google, whose audience must surely skew towards students, would suffer the most.

Nice theory, but Hitwises stats today shows that the fact just dont bear the theory out here. You see, while Google is most assuredly more popular among the 18-24 demographic than Yahoo is, the 18-24 demographic makes up a (slightly) greater percentage of Yahoos audience. (And overall, Yahoos audience is skewed younger than Googles, which follows a much more normal-shaped distribution.)

I promise you, this is a lot easier to understand than Im making it sound. How about some lovely hypothetical numbers to illustrate?

Lets say that there were a million searchers in December. Using Nielsens and Hitwises numbers to extrapolate for our much much smaller hypothetical world:

So, obviously Google has more students using it. Again, using more hypotheticals, lets say that approximately half of all students stop using search engines in December.

Because a slightly greater proportion of Yahoos audience are in the 18-24 (student) demographic, there is a slightly greater impact of decreased student usage. Even if we take into account the fact that Nielsen says that Google searchers perform 37.9 searches and Yahoo searchers perform 22.4 searches, the difference is still extremely negligible, perhaps even less than one thousandth of a percentage point.

So, whats the point? The point is that students are not the reason why Google lost a tiny amount of market share in December. We may never know the reason why, but odds are good that it was nothing more than a blip on the charts.

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