While Microsoft is focusing on the organic evolution of its search engine, Live Search continues to lose ground to Google. With Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer trumpeting commitment to take down the Mountain View-search giant, the reality delivers an entirely different perspective on the market performance of Live Search. In fact, the Redmond company is seeing the little share of the market it has gained with Live Search erode from month to month, with all the crumbs swallowed by Google. At the end of November 2008, Live Search accounted for just 8.3% of the U.S. search engine market, according to comScore.

“In November 2008, Americans conducted 12.3 billion core searches, a 3-% decline versus October, which can primarily be attributed to November having one fewer days in the month,” comScore revealed. “Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in November with 63.5% of the searches conducted, up 0.4% age points from October, followed by Yahoo Sites (20.4%), Microsoft Sites (8.3%), Ask Network (4.0%), and AOL LLC (3.8%).”

At the start of the year Microsoft made an unsolicited offer to take over Yahoo, a move designed as a direct attack on Google. At the end of 2008 both Yahoo-Google and Yahoo-Microsoft potential marriages have failed to materialize. However, the latest round of speculation indicates that Microsoft and Yahoo are indeed negotiating a new search alliance, one which will undoubtedly help the Redmond giant close the gap that separates it from Google.

In November, Live Search went down from 8.5% in the previous month to just 8.3%, even with the Live Search Cashback program failing to fuel an increase in audience, especially in a month that signaled the debut of the 2008 holiday shopping season. Yahoo's search share has also slipped from 20.5% to 20.4% in the past two months. Meanwhile, Google has managed to increase its lion's share on the search engine market, growing from 63.1% in October to 63.5% in November.

“Americans conducted 12.3 billion searches at the core search engines, down 3 percent from October. Google Sites handled 7.8 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.5 billion, and Microsoft Sites with 1 billion,” comScore added.