For a while, it seemed like Google China was doing better – the company had partnered with Sina, bought a stake in Tianya, and received the Chinese government’s permission to provide content.  Now things don’t look so great – Baidu’s market share is up, and Google’s has gone down.

August figures for search engine share as recorded by Compete found Google with two-thirds of queries made during the month.

Search sites measured by comScore under their new qScore 2.0 methodology will benefit from the hosted and affiliated search traffic they send back to the main search engine. It’s a scenario that offers Google a heaping helping of share by comScore’s reckoning.

Session talkers at SES San Jose 2007 bounded around the topic of the search landscape: what’s popular, and who’s the most used among the major players in search.

When web services firm Compete stripped out the Club Live numbers from MSN/Live Search share, Microsoft still enjoyed a month to month gain in search.

By the raw numbers, comScore’s assessment of June’s search market share showed a 2.9 point rise for Microsoft, while Google, Yahoo, and Ask collectively lost 2.9 points. Yahoo said the reason for this isn’t a zero-sum calculation.

Jerry Yang’s return as Yahoo CEO experienced a less than auspicious start to his first time back at the helm for an earnings announcement, as the numbers showed a dip in display ad performance.

At this point you start to wonder why bother: Google reins supreme in the realm of search, Yahoo doesn’t, neither does Microsoft, and everybody else might as well hang it up.

MGoogle Grows, Others Slow

The Hitwise count of US search market share found Google rising, Yahoo and Microsoft dropping, and Ask picking up a smidgeon of searches.

Yahoo gave away 0.6 percent of US search engine market share in March 2007, with Google and Microsoft gaining at Yahoo’s expense by comScore’s numbers. Higher expenses in the first quarter led to shares of YHOO sinking after hours.

Yahoo’s properties have gained overall by Compete’s computations, but the gains haven’t been led by the big name content areas like Search, Maps, or Sports.

Hitwise and comScore have been the main sources cited for search engine market share from month to month; Compete has made some changes on its reports that they believe give them a solid alternative to numbers from the other firms.

Speaking of browsers, I’m working with a client site right now that gets substantial traffic, and gets 88% of its visits from Internet Explorer (only 10% Firefox)! 95% of the IE visits are v. 6 right now.