Searching to break Google's stranglehold on search

(By Richard Holway 6.00pm 25th May 09) If the rumours are to be believed, Microsoft will launch its new search engine – Kumo – this week. Microsoft doesn’t like losing. But that’s exactly what is happening to it in search. According to ComScore, Microsoft continues to lose market share which, in the US, is now down to 8.2%. This compares with Yahoo’s 20.4% and Google 64.2%. This is pretty important as the global internet search market is reckoned to be worth $40b.

Breaking into the search market is equally difficult. You cannot have missed the huge publicity around the launch of Wolfram Alpha in the last week. I tried very hard to find something useful to do with it – but failed completely. It is clearly a ‘work in progress’.

You might also have noticed that Ask.com has brought Jeeves the Butler back to its Ask Jeeves UK site. Ask has a dwindling 4% of the US search market and seems to have lost its CEO Jim Safka last week. I had the pleasure of meeting Jane Thompson, MD of IAC International, recently. Ask.com is owned by IAC which recently reported revenues down 10% at $332m and an operating loss which had tripled to $33m. But I was unaware of how big they were, their pedigree and the amount of internet assets they still hold. IAC, the owners of Home Shopping Network and Ticketmaster before its spinout in Aug 2008, owns a whole host of internet operations like Match.com and had bought AskJeeves in 2005 for $1.8b. Given that IAC in total today has a market value of $2.3b, I wonder how much ask.com would make today?

Quote of the Week. I was reading the Daily Telegraph on the train on Saturday and there in my favourite “Quote of the Week” section was my old colleague Mike Davis from Ovum with "Steve Ballmer wants to kill Google. Microsoft hates Google. Microsoft believes search is its baby and it desperately wants it back."

I’m sure the mild mannered and good-tempered Ballmer would never think this way…