Microsoft, Yahoo continue to bleed search share

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

November 21, 2007, 4:33 PM

While both companies showed growth in search queries, in the all-important matter of search share, both lost as much as Google gained during the month of October.

Google's search share climbed to 58.5 percent, up 1.5 percent from September. Conversely, Yahoo and Microsoft's share fell to 22.9 and 9.7 percent, down 0.8 and 0.6 percent respectively.

Rounding out the top five was the Ask Network, which showed no change month-to-month at 4.7 percent, and AOL search, which fell 0.1 percent to 4.2 percent.

Microsoft's drop below 10 percent market share continues a slide of just about 3 percent from July of this year. It also shows that the company's efforts to promote its Live Search product are largely falling on deaf ears.

comScore rates search share by taking the top five search engines and counting the queries between them. Among these, 10.5 billion searches were conducted during the month, a 12 percent increase over September.

Google lead all with a 14.8 percent increase in search queries, followed by a 10.7 percent increase by Ask. AOL's queries increased by 9.4 percent, while Yahoo's increased by 8 percent. Microsoft was last, posting a 5.6 percent increase.