Having long given up on an acquisition of Yahoo, the sole growth solution for Microsoft's search engine, short of a partnership with the Sunnyvale-based Internet giant's search division, remains an organic strategy. However, so far, everything that Microsoft has thrown at Google has had little to no impact in terms of jump starting its search share. An illustrative example in this context is delivered by ComScore's perspective over the U.S. search engine market in October 2008.

“In October 2008, Americans conducted 12.6 billion core searches, up 7% versus September, as Google Sites maintained its top position with more than 63% of all core searches conducted,” ComScore revealed. “Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in October with 63.1% of the searches conducted, up 0.2%age points from September, followed by Yahoo Sites (20.5%), Microsoft Sites (8.5 %), Ask Network (4.2 %), and AOL LLC (3.7 %).”

While Google jumped from a share of the searches of 62.9% in September to 63.1%, and Yahoo from 20.2% to 20.5% in the same period of time, Live Search failed to gain or to lose any market share. Microsoft's search engine remained stuck at a search share of 8.5%, a tendency that illustrated the company's inability to build additional market share, and to gather more “eyeballs” relying just on the organic evolution of Live Search.

Still, the Redmond company has yet to give up the fight. Reportedly, Live Search is heading straight for a rebrand, which could breath additional life into the service. Microsoft did confirm that Live Search had branding issues, but it failed to do the same when it came down to its plans for the recently acquired Kumo.com domain. Speculation points out that the software giant is considering rechristening Live Search as Kumo.  

“Americans conducted 12.6 billion searches at the core search engines, a 7% gain versus September. Google Sites handled 8 billion core searches (up 7%), followed by Yahoo Sites with 2.6 billion (up 9%) and Microsoft Sites with 1.1 billion (up 8%),” ComScore added.