Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) share of the US search market rose to 64% in March. During the same month last year, its share was 58% according to Hitwise.
Yahoo!'s (NASDAQ: YHOO) share dropped from 22% last March to 21%. Numbers for MSN (NASDAQ: MSFT) fell off a cliff, down to 9% from 13% last year. Ask.com, owned by IAC (NASDAQ: IACI), fell from 4% to 3.5%.
The survey begs two questions. The first is whether Microsoft has any serious intention of becoming a force in the search business. It claims that search is a strategic part of its desktop strategy and Microsoft Live. But there's little evidence for this with each passing month. There are infrequent rumors that the world's largest software company might buy Yahoo! At this point, it would have to do that to get back into the search game.
The second question is what the management at IAC is doing. Ask.com has not shown any indication that it can gain much more than 4% of the market. Why it would not auction off its search capacity the way that Viacom (NYSE:VIA) recently did is hard to say. Google appears to have given News Corp (NYSE:NWS) a $900 million guarantee for the exclusive right to provide search for MySpace. Barry Diller and Company should do the same thing.
Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-11-2007 @ 8:45PM
Peter said...
Ask currently has a deal with GOOG whereby GOOG serves its keyword adds next to Ask's algorithmic search results. This is the same business relationship that GOOG has with MySpace. The only difference is that Ask's Google deal is 3 years old, so the terms are below market. It expires later this year, so Ask may vastly improve its revenue per search (assuming click through rates are flat to positive).