Well, yes. Microsoft search is out of the dump. Although it is still too early to tell if this is just a fluke or if the trend will last, the Redmond Company has managed to turn its search around. While competing for the same piece of the pie, MSN Search and Windows Live Search, in concert, have experienced a positive Year over Year growth in January 2007. Microsoft's search market share was suffering at the end of 2006. In December 2006 MSN/Windows Live Search accounted for a YOY of -9.7%.

But by the end of January, the Redmond Company has succeeded in breathing some life into its search. According to data made public by market research company Nielsen//NetRatings, the two concurrent Microsoft search services now have a 2.5% YOY.

This is synonymous with 642,694,000 search queries being introduced into either MSN or Windows Live Search in the first month of 2007. By comparison, in December, Microsoft only returned results for 499,946,000 searches.

However, with 642,694,000 search queries, Microsoft is lagging behind Google. The service provided by the Mountain View company has completed 3,862,374,000 searches in January. And with an Year over Year growth of 40.6%, Google has taken the lion's share of the search market, no less than 53.7%.

In the shadow of the Mountain View search giant, Yahoo's search share dropped compared to December. Yahoo's search share in January is 22.7%, down from 23.6% in December 2006. This although Yahoo has increased the actual volume of search queries. Only 1,412,904,000 queries were entered into Yahoo in December, and in January 2007 that number has grown to 1,629,995,000.