InsideMicrosoft

Holy Crap! Live Search Gaining! (Maybe!)

Compete.com released search engine market share numbers for June 2007, and their numbers show Windows Live Search with a major gain. Live Search went from 8.4% market share in May 2007 to 13.2%, a gain of 67.3% in query volume and 48.4% in volume from June 2006. Microsoft didn’t just erase any losses of the last year; compared with numbers by other analytics firms, Microsoft erased their search engine losses of the last two or three years!

Now, we can’t draw any long-term conclusions for several reasons. First off, Compete has a growing reputation, but we’d need to see similar gains from the big three web analysis firms of Hitwise, Nielsen, and ComScore, before we can truly trust them. Also, a one-month gain, while spectacular, doesn’t matter if they don’t get to keep the market share next month.

And that brings the big question: How did it happen? Surprisingly, there’s a very direct answer that accounts for the entire gain: The Live Search Club. The site, where you play games for prizes, is contributing heavily towards bringing new searchers to Live.com. According to Compete, club.live.com had three million visitors in June, a ten-fold increase from May, and up from zero in April. The most popular game? Chicktionary, where you make words out of chicken eggs.

The reason Live Search Club is so effective: When you play a game, the top half of the screen is a game, the bottom half is Live Search. You almost half to use the search engine if you are stuck on a puzzle, and that exposes players to the search engine. If they like it, they stay.

I can’t wait to see the new numbers, because this seems to be the real deal. If this can be the beginning of the turnaround for Live Search, that’s amazing.

Microsoft’s gain came almost entirely from Google. Read about Google’s loss at InsideGoogle.
(via Danny, who provided the chart)

July 10th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Google, Windows, Search, General | 4 comments