14 DAY TRIAL // Bad news for Microsoft as 2007 comes to an end. The Redmond company's search share continues its process of erosion, placing Live Search on a strict trajectory toward the background of the search market. Even with the complex overhauling of Live Search started at the end of September, synonymous with the introduction of version 2.0 for the service debuted in 2005, Microsoft is still an undisputed underdog in comparison to Google and Yahoo. The now traditional bronze winner in a three-horse race against the Mountain View and Sunnyvale Internet giants, the Redmond company will be in danger of becoming a bottom feeder on the search market, if it continues to fail in attracting and keeping users.
But in the context of Google's search saturation, Microsoft has serious problems in getting a hold of new eyeballs, but most of all, permanently converting them to Live Search. The latest statistics published by Nielsen Online give Live Search and MSN a share of just 12.0% of all the searches on the U.S. market in November, with an average of 27.8 searches per searcher. The numbers spell disaster for Microsoft as the company has lost almost 2% of the search engine market from October 2007, when it accounted for a share of 13.8%. The Redmond company's search services attracted only 880 million searches in November, compared to almost 1.1 billion two months ago.
Google also recorded less queries (from 4,400 billion to 4,253 billion), but still increased its market share, jumping from 55.5% to 57.7%. Yahoo, on the other hand, is down on all fronts, dropping from 1.49 billion searches and 18.8% in October, to an audience of 1,3 billion and a market share of 17.9% in November. Nielsen Online's data is correlated with that of Hitwise, which placed MSN/Live Search at 7.09% the past month, compared to 7.42% in October. The only "good" news for Microsoft came from comScore, which revealed that Live Search and MSN were at the same level both in October and in November - 9.8% with just a little over 1 billion searches.