Microsoft crawls on the search engine market, but as long as it has an ascendant trajectory, the growth pace of MSN and Windows Live Search is less relevant in the overall evolution in the race with Google and Yahoo. Two leading Internet metrics companies published their statistics almost concomitantly revealing similar conclusions. Microsoft is gaining ground a few percentages at a time, and closing the gap that separates it from Yahoo, the runner-up on the search engine market.

Data made available by Nielsen//NetRatings for the top U.S. search providers in July has Microsoft in the traditional third place, but at 13.6% of the market, compared to 13.3% in June. Nielsen//NetRatings calculated the combined results of both MSN and Windows Live Search and informed that Microsoft accounted for over 1 billion queries the past month.

Google is of course still intangible for Microsoft with no less than 4.14 billion queries in July and a search share of 53.3%. But Yahoo's position is more vulnerable and Microsoft could challenge the second place on the search engine market by the end of the year if it keeps its growth momentum. Just a little over 6% of the market separates Microsoft from Yahoo. With 1.5 billion queries and a search share of 20.1%, Yahoo now more than ever has to interpret Microsoft's growth as a direct threat to its status.

comScore painted a similar picture, with the inherent variations of the different metrics mechanisms. "In July, Google Sites ranked as the top core search engine with 55.2 percent share of searches among the top five engines. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 23.5 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (12.3 percent), Ask Network (4.7 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.4 percent)," comScore announced.

According to comScore, Yahoo's search share in the U.S. was eroded from June to July, dropping from 23.8% to 23.5%. Google continues to own the lion's share of searches jumping from 54.9% to 55.2% the past month. And Microsoft is also on the rise with a negligible 0.1% increase to 12.3%, but an increase nonetheless.

"Google Sites led the market with nearly 5.5 billion search queries in July, up 2.4 percent versus June and 64 percent versus year ago, followed by Yahoo! Sites (up 0.8 percent to 2.3 billion searches), Microsoft Sites (up 2.8 percent to 1.2 billion), Ask Network (up 2.9 percent to 462 million), and Time Warner Network (down 0.9 percent to 436 million). Google benefits disproportionately from affiliate searches and multi-tab searches that help raise its share of core searches," comScore added.