Microsoft continues to loose ground in search

The blogs have heavily commented the recent acquisition of aQuantive by Microsoft, as part of a move in strategic businesses. They have been put back in perspective of the great number of acquisitions of advertising companies over the past 8 weeks. All of it seems to be based on future earnings in online advertsiing.

All this makes me think of the other war…The company which controls the « search » environment is likely to take over the web…Until the next killer app comes around. What will it be? What happens after you’ve found what you searched for ? How do you stick to it and enrich it?

Nielsen/NetRatings released on May 21st that Microsoft’s search business lost market share in April, from 10,1% in March to 9%. In the same research, Google is increasing its lead and represents 55.2% of web searches, up from 53.7% in March. Yahoo! remains stable : +0.1% with a 21.9% market share. I was meeting last week with a top R&D executive from Microsoft who conceded easily that their search engine was not nearly as performing as Google (which he uses by the way).