14 DAY TRIAL // InformationWeek cites the Internet metrics company comStore and publishes the overall number of U.S. search queries, that reached 8 billion last month, up 6% from May and more than 25% from June 2006. After months of complete domination of the search market, Google starts losing market share to Microsoft, but for now it is still too early to determine if Google got as high as it's ever going to get or if Microsoft is finally getting at least some things right and is starting to close the gap on its rival.
"Google has a tendency to see share declines during the summer, driven in part by vacations, fewer work days, and reliance on academia from its core user base," said comScore spokesperson Andrew Lipsman via e-mail (again cited by InformationWeek), noting that Google and Yahoo both saw increases in query volume in June and that Google's "share decline is really a function of the disproportionate increase at Microsoft this month."
comStore released statistics that depict each major player's position on the U.S. search market. From a massive 50.7% in May, Google's share decreased to 49.5% in June. Google is still the biggest player on that U.S. market. Once a great and popular search engine, Yahoo's share of the market declines even more, hitting 25.1% from the previous 26.4%. The search engine Ask, never too popular, remains unchanged at 5%. And now comes the interesting part, as Microsoft's U.S. search share rose from 10.3% to 13.2%, "due in large part to Live Search Club, a program launched by Microsoft in late May to engage and reward users of Live Search," comScore said. As seen above, Microsoft's search engine is only on the third place.
Users of Microsoft Live Search Club claim that people are using macros and other software to automate Live Search Club queries for the sake of collecting prizes awarded for playing Live Search-based games. Presumably, this could explain the increase in the queries processed by Microsoft's search engine. The company says it is dealing with the issue. "As for click fraud, there is always a risk with these kinds of promotions, and we are working diligently to shut down any illegal activity," a Microsoft spokesperson said last week.