nomis5 - 8:17 am on Jan 21, 2010 (gmt 0)

Bing has been around some time now and the latest Comscore figures show that the Bing / Yahoo combined share remains almost static as does the Google share. Microsoft is piling in money and effort to Bing (USA anyway) and moving only fractionally without any corresponding drop in the Google share.

The other minor players are slowly but surely loosing market share, that is with the exception of the social media sites like MySpace, YouTube Facebook etc. I agree with the previous poster that these are where the threat lies to Google, although Google already owns YouTube. When the younger generation want to know how to make / service / review widgets, they are increasingly going to the social media and video sites rather than the established search engines.

It's my opinion that video sites (YouTube is the only real player here) are the area where the battle is slowly moving to. The Microsoft attack on Google's share may well be misplaced, they should be attacking YouTube' share of the video market. YouTube / Google has roughly a 90% share of the video search market, making the cost of YouTube ($1.65 billion) look increasingly good value for money.

Is Microsoft fighting a battle (and not winning) in an area that is declining? Maybe Google is happy that Microsoft pours billions into that particular market whilst Google builds itself up in more relevant areas.