Microsoft is seeing very little love for its efforts on the search market, but the company is on an overall ascendant trend. Still, the Redmond company's search engine doesn't even come close to its main rival from Mountain View Google, from a position where its services are essentially synonymous with Internet search, and it is the indisputable pack leader of the search engine market. Moreover, Google is benefiting from an excellent momentum in terms of the growth of its audience and its usage. None of the other players on the search engine market even manage to come close to the Mountain View Internet giants, Microsoft included.

In terms of core search market growth, the latest statistics published by comScore for the U.S. market reveal that, in December 2006, Google was up to 5,6 billion queries, having grown by over 1 billion queries per month, compared to December 2006. By comparison, Microsoft's Live Search only managed to add some 70 million searches per month, between December 2006 and December 2007. comScore's figures also paint a picture of the suffering Yahoo that is down 4% in terms of search volume, from 2.3 billion queries in December 2006 to just 2.2 billion in the last month of the past year.

"In 2007, searches at the five major core search engines increased 15 percent to 9.6 billion searches. Google Sites led with 5.6 billion searches in December 2007, up more than 30 percent from the previous year. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 2.2 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (940 million), Time Warner Network (442 million), and Ask Network (415 million). More than 113 billion core searches were conducted in the U.S. during all of 2007, with Google Sites accounting for nearly 64 billion, representing a 56 percent share of the market," comScore revealed.