It might be too soon to say the buzzards are circling Yahoo, but things are looking dire for the struggling portal when it comes to search. The latest comScore numbers show that Yahoo's share of the U.S. search market was 17.5 percent in November, its lowest level ever, according to The New York Times.
In fact, Yahoo's search share has been in steady decline, dropping from 20.5 percent in May. So who's to blame? The numbers seem to point to Bing, which continued its consistent growth in November by taking 10.3 percent of all searches, a two-year high for Microsoft. Google also increased its share of the market by 0.1 percent, giving it an astounding 65.5 percent, or nearly two thirds of all searches done in the U.S.
Yahoo is attributing some of the losses to the end of distribution deals, and the company was already putting a positive spin on search last week. CFO Tim Morse said search ad revenue was up due to the holidays, and upcoming improvements promise a better search experience.
The tables have turned from a year ago, when Microsoft's Live Search was the engine steadily losing share. Yahoo and Microsoft will soon begin a deal that essentially hands the reins of Yahoo's search business to Microsoft. But will Microsoft remain interested in the deal if it continues to steal Yahoo's share of the market?