MSN / Live Search Growth Declines 10% in 2006

By Loren Baker, Editor | February 1, 2007

Nielsen//NetRatings has issued the findings of their December 2006 search share rankings, which shows increases in year-on-year growth rates for every major search engine in the US market except for MSN / Windows Live Search:

Provider (000) Growth Searches
Google Search 3,035,617 22.6% 50.8%
Yahoo! Search 1,412,904 30.1% 23.6%
MSN/Windows Live Search 499,946 -9.7% 8.4%
AOL Search 362,140 7.8% 6.1%
My Way Search 141,527 4.7% 2.4%
Ask.com Search 128,452 17.2% 2.1%
EarthLink Search 31,930 17.6% 0.5%
Dogpile.com Search 30,487 2.1% 0.5%
Comcast Search 26,931 N/A 0.5%
NexTag Search 26,835 123.2% 0.4%

The amazing part of these numbers is that the Windows Operating System corners the PC market, the Internet Explorer browser enjoys a 59% market share, and Microsoft has become the darling of the press with their Vista rollout, but they are still losing share of the search engine market.

One has to wonder if the adoption of Vista by the PC market and Vista’s ‘always on’ web integrated document and file searching capabilities will help Microsoft reclaim part of the search market, or if Microsoft users will continue to switch over to Google and Yahoo powered search tools.