Microsoft is eating away at Yahoo in a pure case of cannibalism on the search engine market. Cannibalism because the Redmond and the Sunnyvale companies are traditional partners on a number of common initiatives and projects, the most successful of which is the interoperability bridge between their respective instant messaging clients, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger, debuted in 2006. But still, the search market is a dog eat dog world, and Microsoft needs to grow at all costs. Even if it has to step all over yahoo to do it. At this point in time the near monopoly that Google has with its search engine does not bode well with the Redmond company.

Microsoft is a classic example of a monopolist, a side-effect of its dominant Windows operating system, and it simply cannot deal with being the underdog. Since the debut of 2007, Microsoft's search engines have indicated signs of reinvigoration. Earlier this year, between May and June, the Redmond's company share of searches on the U.S. market exploded. The combined results of MSN and Windows Live Search jumped in a single month from 605 million unique searches and a share of 8.4% to 985 million queries and 13.3% of the market, according to statistics provided by Nielsen//NetRatings.

Yahoo suffered with each search that was going to Microsoft and dropped from 21.5% to just 20.2% and from 1.54 billion searches to 1.49 billion. Google was also impacted. The Mountain View company lost 3.6% of the search engine market, from 56.3% to 52.7% between May and June. The sudden increase in MSN and Windows Live Search market share was attributed to a strategic marketing move on Microsoft's behalf and the integration of search-based games with Live Search.

One thing that Microsoft did manage to accomplish in May-June was to introduce a descendant trend for Yahoo. In August, on the U.S. market, Yahoo's share of all the searches was just 19.9%, passing under the 20% milestone. The Sunnyvale Internet giant is most hurt by Microsoft's growth, as Google is slowly regaining its position. The Mountain View Internet giant is up at 53.6% of the market again with almost 4.2 billion queries in August. Yahoo only managed 1.56 billion searches and Microsoft just over 1 billion. The overall search share of MSN and Live Search eroded a tad from 13.6% in July to 12.9% in June, but the Redmond company is enjoying a Year over Year growth of 69.8%, almost double than that of Google, and seven times larger than Yahoo's.