Microsoft News Tracker

In what is becoming the Web search world’s equivalent of TV ratings, comScore yesterday released their March US search rankings:

• Google was up 0.2% over February to 48.3%
• MSN was up 0.4% to 10.9%
• Yahoo was down 0.6% to 27.5%

Yes, we are talking small numbers and the other search rankings services have their own slightly different ratings (e.g. Hitwise which had both Microsoft and Yahoo down for the month), but it didn’t look good on a day when Wall Street was already less than pleased with Yahoo performance.

One final caveat: search is really a world market and it’s also worthwhile to consider how things are going in non-US venues. To that end, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise UK blogged their UK statistics for the four weeks up to April 15 and Google has nearly an 80% share and is running away with the game while Microsoft is in fourth place behind Yahoo and Ask.com and falling. Two countries don’t make a worldview, but one wonders whether there is some place where Microsoft is doing well.