According to comScore, the June 2007 market share for online search saw a slight drop in market share for Google. The company captured 49.5 percent of online searches performed, down from 50.7 percent in June - good enough for Google to easily lead the market. Microsoft, on the other hand, proved the big gainer with a 2.9 percent boost of search share from May to June grabbing 13.2 percent of search share.
Coming in second was Yahoo! with 25.1 percent share of the market, down from 26.4 percent in May, while in fourth and fifth place with 5 percent and 4.2 percent of the online U.S. search market were sites Ask.com and AOL, respectively. However, these results don't necessary indicate that Google has peaked or that Microsoft is finally closing the gap with Google.
"Google has a tendency to see share declines during the summer, driven in part by vacations, fewer work days, and reliance on academia from its core user base," said comScore spokesperson Andrew Lipsman
Microsoft's boost in the search market was also linked to Club Live, a collection of play for prizes online word games that requires players to use Live Search in order to participate. Furthermore, users of Microsoft Live Search Club claim that people have been using macros to automate Live Search Club queries for the sake of collecting prizes, and therefore increasing the number of queries processed by Microsoft's search engine. Indeed, Microsoft appears to recognize this problem and says to be dealing with the issue:
"As for click fraud, there is always a risk with these kinds of promotions, and we are working diligently to shut down any illegal activity"