Thursday, 12 July 2007

Microsoft Search Share Increases, Google, Yahoo Falls

Microsoft may finally have some good news. For long it played a third fiddle in the battle for searches behind Google and Yahoo but now a new survey says Microsoft’s search has found some hope and lots of new users...

Microsoft may finally have some good news. For long it played a third fiddle in the battle for searches behind Google and Yahoo but now a new survey says Microsoft’s search has found some hope and lots of new users.

According to Internet metrics company Compete Inc., MSN and Microsoft Live's US search query volume jumped from 8.4 per cent in May to 13.2 per cent in June, a whopping 67 per cent increase.

However the increase in the share has come at a price. Microsoft gave away prizes to lure people to use its search engine.

Compete analyst Steve Willis said, "A good portion of the additional Live searches are coming from the Live Search Club, where you can apparently play games for points which you can redeem for fine Microsoft products. All of the games involve using Live's search engine -- to get the points, you have to search with Live."

According to Willis, Club.live.com’s traffic was not that appreciable as late as April, but there were noticeable differences in May when Microsoft first started giving away prizes. In May, Compete tracked some 330,000 unique visitors at that site. In June, that number had risen to 3 million unique visitors.

Willis said, "If Microsoft can actually leverage this traffic to Club.live into actual search users and string together a few more months like this, they could really threaten Google's top spot.”

Among other search engines, Amazon's Alexa.com has had a sizeable increase in traffic at Club.live and a 52 per cent increase in page views over the past three months.

Google saw its search query volume drop from 67 per cent in May to 62.7 per cent in June, a 6.5 per cent decline.

Yahoo's search query share stood at 19.6 per cent in June, down from 19.7 per cent in May and from 26.7 per cent in June 2006.

Ask.com's search query share declined to 3.3 per cent in June, down 3.5 per cent in May and 4.1 per cent from June 2006.