Back in September 2006, as a part of the evolution to Windows Live Wave 2.0, Microsoft introduced the new Live Search. But six months later, the largest update in the history of Live Search since the service was introduced in January 2005 did nothing for Microsoft on the search engine market. The Redmond company's search audience, as well as its slice of searches, continues to erode month after month with Google swallowing all the loose crumbs. This is nothing but bad news for Microsoft that has identified Google as its target on the search engine and online advertising markets with the $44.5 billion acquisition proposal for Yahoo.

"In February, Google Sites extended its share of core searches to 59.2%, up from 58.5% the previous month. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 21.6%, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.6%), AOL LLC (4.9%), and Ask Network (4.6%)," comScore revealed. "Americans conducted 9.9 billion searches at the core search engines, representing a 6-percent decline versus January. Each of the five core search engines experienced search query declines as a result of February being a seasonally soft month for overall search activity. Google Sites saw more than 5.8 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.1 billion, and Microsoft Sites with 953 million."

Google attracted no less than 5,8 billion queries in February out of the total of 9,8 billion searches. Yahoo is at 2.1 billion and Microsoft is under the 1 billion mark at just 953 million queries for February. A potential merger between the Redmond company and the Sunnyvale Internet giant would throw their combined share on the search engine market to approximately 30% and 30 billion searches per month. But this would only place the two companies at half of the Google numbers. Even with the added eyeballs of Yahoo, Microsoft will still be far from breathing down Google's neck.