Jeff – Ask has consistently held to about 4% market share for quite some time. They have maintained good market/brand awareness, even if they aren’t talked about as often as the big three of G/Y/M.

And more importantly, what search engine does AllThingsDigital use? I type in Dell and the first hit is from 2007. How lame is that!

It is completely inaccurate to imply that Statcounter (or any other market share numbers I am aware of) show a 50% y/o/y decline in search market share for Yahoo.

[1] http://www.comscore.com/Press_.....e_Rankings

[2] http://ir.comscore.com/release.....eid=335556

[3] http://gs.statcounter.com/#sea.....807-200908

I’ve always said that “search” doesn’t lend itself to tightly controlled monopoly in the same way that a painful to install or replace operating system does. Maybe at some point the Justice Department, currently snoozing with its head comfortably ensconced in Microsoft’s posterior will wake up to this.

On the other hand, it may simply be another activity on which Microsoft willingly loses money quarter after quarter while other, smaller Internet entities eek out a living under the Microsoft radar. Microsoft’s action often go not so much to making money directly, but to insuring that those who do make money, on software and hardware, are forced to go through the MS toll booth. I see no change here.

When I was doing research for a living one of my favorite tools (who’s name I’ve forgotten) was a Windows application that submitted search strings to a dozen or so search engines, extracted the results “screen scraper” style without the help of APIs and eliminated the need for the user to see ads, or tortured fancy formatting. Just the results ma’am.

Google with its clean interface (and API) made such tools (and Windows) mostly unnecessary, but they could always return, and the burden of housing hundreds of thousands of servers to perform a profitless “public service” of search could return. Hey, maybe we could even have the government take over search. Rather than label Microsoft’s predatory behavior for what it is, simply label Google “too big to fail” and take it over. There seems to be a trend in that direction.