At the end of the past year, Microsoft's search share took a heavy hit, according to statistics provided by Nielsen Online. On the search engine market, the Redmond company has continually seen its share deplete gradually, but the downward trajectory of Live Search took a steep plunge down just a couple of months ahead of the end of 2008. Nielsen Online indicated that, on the U.S. market, Live Search lost approximately 2% of search shares between October and November 2008, with Google picking up the lost audience.

“An estimated 4.8 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 61.2 percent of all search queries conducted during the given time period,” Nielsen online revealed for October, indicating that in November “An estimated 5.2 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 64.1 percent of all search queries conducted during the given time period.”

U.S. users conducted no less than 7,7 billion searches in October 2008, out of which only 885 million where entered into Live Search. At that time, Nielsen Online credited Live Search with a market share of 11.4%, and a year-on-year growth of 19.0%. With 4,75 billion searches, Google accounted for the lion's share of the U.S. search engine market, synonymous with 61.2% of the entire volume of queries for October. Yahoo came in second, with just 1,3 billion queries and a 16.9% share of the searches.

Between October and November, Microsoft lost over 150 million searches. Live Search's market share dropped to just 9.1%, meaning that the software giant managed to attract barely double the number of queries credited to AOL Search, which had 344 million. Yahoo also went down by just 1,2 billion searches and 16.1%. At the same time, Google swallowed all the searches that Live Search was missing. The Mountain View search giant grew to approximately 5,2 billion queries and a market share of 64.1% in the U.S.