Microsoft is the undisputed underdog of the search market, and the now traditional occupant of the third position in the constant race against direct rivals Google and Yahoo. But the fact of the matter is that the combined results of MSN and Live Search do not manage to ensure that the Redmond company will trail only the Mountain View and the Sunnyvale Internet giants. According to the latest statistics made available by Internet metrics company comScore, Microsoft is not third on the search engine market, at a global level.

While MSN and Live Search are indeed placed firmly in the third position on various tiers across the world and on individual markets, when it comes down at drawing the line for the slices of the international search pie, Microsoft is only fourth. Google is of course still the undisputed leader, attracting the vast majority of in excess of 1.4 million searches per minute, going to the Mountain View search giant.

In this context, Microsoft has to be content not only with the search crumbs from Google's feast, but also to watch Yahoo and Baidu fatten their shares of the market in its detriment. comScore's qSearch 2.0 service revealed in an inaugural report that worldwide, Microsoft's footprint on the search engine market is inferior to that of Google, Yahoo and Baidu. The international search pattern attributes only 2.2 billion searches to both MSN and Live Search.

With its share, Microsoft is nothing more than an insignificant search player. By comparison, Google conducted an estimated 37 billion searches in August. In this regard, the Mountain View company jumps over the 60% search market share milestone. The runner-up, Yahoo attracted over 8.5 billion searches. But the overall positioning on the search market hurts Microsoft even more, as Baidu, the dominant search engine in China scored 3.3 billion queries, 1.1 billion more than MSN and Live Search put together.

What is interesting is that more than half of Microsoft's search share comes just from the U.S. with over 1 billion queries. But at the same time Baidu is the dominant presence on the Chinese market, and still it broke in the top three search providers worldwide ahead of the Redmond company.