Microsoft's Live Search is reduced to swallowing the crumbs from Google's feast on the search engine market. But the Redmond company has little problems embracing the audience that slips off Google. And the fact of the matter is that Microsoft lives and breathes on the queries shaved of the Mountain View-based search engine giant. The traditional occupant of the third position on the search engine market, in the buffer zone between Google and Yahoo, and the pack of search bottom feeders lead by AOL Search, Microsoft has experienced a strong growth at the end of 2007, according to statistics provided by Nielsen Online.

Accounting for a share of 12.0% of all the searches performed on the U.S. market in November 2007, with an average of 27.8 queries per person, MSN/Windows Live Search was at a little over 880 searches. At the same time, Yahoo had 17.9% of the market and 1.3 billion searches, while Google remained the indisputable leader with 57.7% and 4.3 billion searches. "An estimated 4.3 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 58% of all search queries conducted during the given time period", Nielsen Online revealed citing data for November 2007.

But in December of the past year, Microsoft has started seeing the first signs of the introduction of Live Search 2.0 in the fall of 2007. With direct rivals losing their grip on the search engine market, Microsoft attracted no less than 13.8% of all searches with an average of 31.7% queries per searcher. In this manner, the combined results of MSN and Live Search climbed almost to 1 billion searches. It is too early to tell if this is the beginning of a new trend, or just a fluke.

But Microsoft has seen its share of searches oscillating throughout 2007, a move that in the end pointed just to a general stagnation. Nielsen Online indicated that both the search shares of Yahoo and Google suffered at the end of the past year. Google is down at 56.3% from 57.7% in November, with just 4 billion searches, while Yahoo slipped a little less to just 1.27 billion searches and a share of 17.7%.