14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is going down on all fronts in the search industry. Statistics provided by the three top metrics analysis companies all agree on Microsoft's descendant trajectory. At the end of the past week, comScore made public its monthly qSearch analysis looking at the top search engines.
"In April 2007, Google Sites captured 49.7 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining 1.4 share points from the previous month. Yahoo! Sites maintained its second place ranking with 26.8 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.3 percent), Ask Network (5.1 percent) and Time Warner Network (5.0 percent)," comScore revealed.
Out of the 7.3 billion searches online in April, Microsoft only managed to attract 757 million queries, and, as such, has lost market share, falling to 10.3% from 10.9% the previous month. Yahoo also witnessed a decrease in the volume of queries. With a total of 2.0 billion searches, Yahoo's share went down from 27.5% in March to 26.8% in April.
Google continues to be pack leader, a position which remains undisputed after April's 3.6 billion search queries. The Mountain View search giant has increased its market share by 1.4 percent, growing to 49.7% from 48.3%.
However, not only comScore, but also Hitwise and Nielsen//NetRatings have signaled that Microsoft has once again begun to lose its grip on the search market, following a promising debut at the beginning of 2007. Hitwise credited Microsoft's search with a share of just 8.46%, adding the results of Live Search and MSN. According to Hitwise's data, Microsoft has dropped from 9.15% in March.
The same drastic results have been confirmed by Nielsen//NetRatings. With just 612,526,000 searches performed, Live Search and MSN account for a share of just 9.0%, also down from March. Microsoft's oscillations on the search market are a clear indication that the Redmond company is indeed pouring efforts into its search business, but that the competition - represented mainly by Google and Yahoo - is not only outperforming it, but also getting the lion's share when it comes to customer preferences.