MSN/Windows Live Search garnered 9 percent of the search market in April, a drop from its 10.1 showing in March, but still good enough for the company to rank third behind market leaders Google (55.2 percent) and Yahoo (21.9 percent).
Following Microsoft in the April rankings were AOL Search (5.4 percent) and Ask.com (1.8 percent), while none of the rest of the companies that rounded out the top 10 had greater than a one percent market share. Those companies were, in order of their rank, My Web Search, Comcast, Earthlink, Dogpile.com and My Way Search.
The search market backslide is likely to be unwelcome news for Microsoft executives, who had expressed cautious optimism concerning their growth in search share in February and March, and who have faced some tough questions from investors over the company’s performance in the search market.
In response to a question posed during an earnings conference call in January, Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell told an analyst, “On the search side you are correct we lost market share,” adding that he was “clearly not happy with that.”
In an interview at the company’s Strategic Account Summit earlier this month, Chief Advertising Strategist for Microsoft Yusuf Mehdi said that while he did not expect to see gains in search market share every month, he was encouraged by the numbers through March.
“I’m not even going to say it’s a trend yet,” Mehdi said regarding the gains Microsoft posted from January through March. “I’m not going to predict that that’s the bottom and now it’s all up, but that’s momentum.”