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Nielsen/NetRatings: MSN/Live Search Grows 77% Year over Year

Nielsen/NetRatings confirms the consensus… with its release of search-volume data for June showing extraordinary gains by Microsoft’s MSN/Windows Live Search - both in year-over-year growth and increase in search share from May to June.

The MegaView Search data released yesterday agrees, in general, with the June search results issued by comScore and Compete - at least in the case of MSN/Windows Live Search.

Though Google and Yahoo retained their top spots in June, with 52.7% and 20.2% of searches, respectively, Microsoft’s increased nearly four percentage points, to 13.3% in June from 8.4% in May, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

Moreover, MSN/Live Search accounted for nearly 1 billion searches in June - an increase of 77% from June 2006, according to the data, while Google’s growth year over year was 46%, and Yahoo’s 20%.

Nevertheless, Google lost 3.6 percentage points, and Yahoo 1.3 percentage points, from May to June, according to the NetRatings data. (See side-by-side chart of May and June search shares.)

Both comScore and Compete attributed the phenomenal growth of Microsoft’s search to its recently launched Live Search Club, which engages users with games that rely on Live Search and rewards users with prizes. However, in its release, Nielsen/NetRatings did not cite a reason for the growth.

Separately, Nielsen released Google and Microsoft data to coincide with earnings reports this week, including some search-related stats:

• The number of sponsored link impressions on the Google platform increased 148% year over year in the second quarter of 2007, from 110.2 billion to 272.7 billion, according to AdRelevance.
• The sponsored search click-through rate for Google Search was 5.9% in April 2007, according to MegaView Custom Analysis.
• The sponsored search click-through rate for MSN Search was 2.0% in April 2007, according to MegaView Custom Analysis.