People Search Digest

Google has long dominated the search engine market. Heck, “to google” has become a common piece of global lexicon. And as their dominance grows, so does Google’s search advertising revenue. In fact, though Google’s share of the search market is an ever-burgeoning 61.6%, their search advertising market share is even higher. Yahoo and Microsoft, which respectively share 20.4% and 9.1% of the search market, suffer from even lower ad revenue. Because Google enjoys such prominence, investors and advertisers flock to their AdWords service. And for the “little” guys, it’s only getting bleaker. Not only are they getting much fewer queries than Google, they are also making less money per query.

Microsoft thinks they might have an inroad into Google’s market share with Live Search CashBack. It basically intends to gain search revenue by giving cash back to consumers who purchase items after making commerce searches. And, since commerce searches are responsible for around 80% of search revenue, if Microsoft can get the commerce searches, they’ll get the revenue. Microsoft tried a test run of this last year and saw a 30% increase in market share that month; Live Search CashBack offers a much more straightforward cash payout to users, so it should be even more attractive and garner even more queries.

Microsoft is still a big name with consumers. While most people obviously go to Google for their searches, it’s not as if Microsoft is some unknown startup trying to gain support and market share. If the word spreads through enough outlets, as it undoubtedly will, Live Search CashBack could become attractive to the audience it’s seeking: the money-conscious segment of the public that does most of the shopping online. That’s not to say there aren’t risks. After all, Microsoft will be foregoing a lot of initial profit in its quest for search market share. Somehow, though, I think Microsoft can survive it. It’s not like they were generating tons of search revenue in the first place, so this is a risk worth taking.

Google’s got a huge lead in the search engine market, and Microsoft isn’t having any delusions of unseating them, but progress can — and should — be made.