14 DAY TRIAL // After a month when Google and Yahoo saw the volume of search queries entered into their respective search engines drop, while MSN/Windows Live Search has jumped up, whether Microsoft has managed to turn its search services around becomes a legitimate question. The Redmond Company has been losing its grip on the search market throughout 2006. But the turn of the year also signaled the first positive results for Microsoft's search.
MSN/Windows Live Search accounted for a 0.5% increase in the share of searches between December 2006 and January 2007, according to data made public by Nielsen//NetRatings. And with that, Microsoft's search was out of the 2006 black hole. Furthermore, the results of the precedent month are starting to turn into a trend.
In February 2006, 618,315,000 queries were submitted to MSN/Windows Live Search down from 642,694,000 the previous month. This translated into a 9.1% Year over Year growth and a total 9.6% share of searches. If Microsoft keeps this up, it will jump past the 10% milestone in March.
Yahoo search has dropped the past month to 1,332,669,000 from 1,629,995,000 in January 2007. In fact, Yahoo has lost a total of 2% of the search share and is down to 20.7% from 22.7%. The total volume of searches entered into Google has also decreased to 3,597,697,000 from 3,862,374,000 just one month ago. Still, the Mountain View search engine retained the first position and even if the number of searches was actually lower in February, it increased Google's search share to 55.8%.