Microsoft Search Retreat Continues
 Joe Wilcox
News Brief. Nobody is gaining on Google, but the whole market is down. Again. |
In February, Web users conducted 9.9 billion searches using what ComScore regards as the core search engines. While a seemingly big number, it's a 6 percent decline from January in continuation of a series of sequential decreases.
All the major search engines saw sequential search declines, including Google, according to ComScore. While search queries increased in January, they fell for most of the core search engines the previous three months. There is a discernible trend.
Still, Google eked out a near 1 percent increase in search share compared with less than 1 percent declines for Microsoft and Yahoo. Google's search share closed on 60 percent in February. If Microsoft and Yahoo were merged, their combined search share would be more than 31 percent.
In the hostile Yahoo takeover, Microsoft sees a springboard to closing on Google's search share. But there's no guarantee that any eventual increases would be cumulative, because of overlapping brands and services.
Then there are those pesky declines. Search query declines were greatest for Microsoft and Yahoo among the core search engines—7 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
Perhaps most troubling for Microsoft: Live Search has made no perceptible, lasting share gains since its September relaunch. Live Search 2.0 was supposed to improve results relevancy and usability.
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Comments (8)
Just a quick question, how many days are in January and how many days are in February?
2 divided by 31 is 6.4%. I wonder why there was an overall decline....
Posted by David Sisson | March 19, 2008 9:41 PM
David,
I believe those are daily numbers. Google handles a lot more than seven billion search inquiries a month.
Posted by Sgt Friday | March 20, 2008 12:35 AM
Joe - can you clarify whether these numbers are per day or for the entire month?
If they are for the entire month - I think the mystery of the declining search numbers is solved by the first poster.
(We had ~6% less sunrises in February '08 than we did in January '08 - we must be trending to darkness!)
Posted by Need the Info | March 20, 2008 8:17 AM
I am going to be honest, I can't find any reason to use Windows Live Search, the results just can't compare to Googles.
Posted by Andre Da Costa | March 20, 2008 9:47 AM
Congratulations Andre, first step on the right way.
Posted by Marco | March 20, 2008 11:30 AM
According to ComScore's website (which I found, naturally, using Google), the following is excerpted from their press release:
"February 2008 saw Americans conduct nearly 10 billion core searches, representing a 6-percent sequential decline in activity versus January, primarily a result of the shortened month."
P.S. the HTML style tags function for posts does not seem to be working....
Posted by Stratocaster | March 21, 2008 1:14 PM
I would say that Google just works fine. Its quick it fast, gives a lot of good hits in the search. The search page opens fast, without advertisements on it to slow it down. Or to put it another way, Google is everything that MSN/WindowsLive is not, and should have been.
MSNLIVE or whatever its called anymore (this week) is a disaster. In the same mold as Vista. In fact, MSNLive is the "Vi$ta of search engines."
Now here is a link about:
How to use Live Hotmail Full Version With Linux
http://navetz.com/view.php?id=109
Quotes from the link;
"Microsoft will block anyone who is using linux from being able to use the full version of Windows Live Hotmail. This should be 100% illegal because they do some user sniffing and check what you are using, if they don''t like it, they block you.
I noticed this when I was trying to add images to my email signature for windows live hotmail and could not do it properly without the full version. I had it finally set up on a different computer, but when I went back to my linux machine, the signature would not send properly unless I was using the full version of Hotmail.
Don''t worry, there is a simple solution and here is how you can trick Hotmail to thinking you are using IE7. Download this firefox add-on. User Agent Switcher.Click Tools -> User Agent Switcher -> Internet Explorer 7 (Windows Vista)Go to Hotmail, Click the options menu and enable the full version of Hotmail.
Somebody should tell Microsoft that this is illegal, and they could be in for another 1.4 Billion dollar lawsuit if they continue blocking Linux users from getting the same features that everyone else gets."
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Note, since I do not use Hotmail, I cannot confirm this. Also, please note that the author of the above link, is talking about the "Full version" of Hotmail. But this goes to the core problems of Micro$oft in general, they value their lock in and their ability to break other products, more than improving their products and services.
Posted by chips | March 21, 2008 2:53 PM
my personal tracking statistics shows google's searching keep increasing a little every month. and much lesser from yahoo. MSN is still great though.
Posted by Peter | March 22, 2008 1:21 PM