Microsoft's search engines have been an oscillating presence on the market. With Google becoming synonymous with Internet search, and with Yahoo a traditional runner up, the Redmond company can barely commit to the third position in the race against its direct rivals. It is obvious that Microsoft wants more, and that the company is pouring a consistent amount of effort into pushing up MSN and Live Search. But the results are always unconvincing and hesitant. Microsoft is far from building a stable trajectory and managing to keep on course. Instead, both MSN and Live Search are swinging back and forth in terms of audience, gaining share one month, only to squander it the next. And Microsoft is going to continue to vacillate on the search engine market unless it develops a strategy with a sense of stability and starts building momentum into it.

June was a major turning point for Microsoft, and it was all thanks to Live Search. To be more specific, it was because of the Live Search Club. The company changed its search game in order to make the users win. Buying audience with prizes won as a consequence of playing Live Search games was a strategy that paid off for Microsoft, but just on short term. Internet metrics companies consequently reported a substantial gain in search volume for Microsoft as the combined results of MSN and Live Search, driven by the Live Search Club explosion, jumped to over 13% of all the searches in the U.S. And if you think that search tricks are too good to last, you are right.

Following June, Microsoft's share of searches began depreciating at a slow but steady pace. And the Redmond company is once again witnessing the erosion of its foothold on the search market to the benefit of Google and Yahoo. The latest statistics from Hitwise come to prove this point. Hitwise credits Microsoft with only 9.85% of the U.S. searches in June, due to different Internet measuring metrics. But the overall tendency is illustrated by the fact that MSN and Live Search dropped to 8.79% in July and to 7.98% in August. This while the past month, Google was credited with 63.98% while Yahoo had 22.87% of the queries in the U.S.