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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.

Microsoft Gains Not Our Loss, Says Yahoo

To illustrate that point, Yahoo passed along more comScore figures. The May and June 2007 qSearch reports showed the number of queries made by US Internet users with the top five search destinations, (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, and AOL).

Drops by Yahoo and others from May to June were only percentage decreases, not purely numeric ones. Of the five engines, only AOL/Time Warner Sites lost queries from May to June, moving from 348 million to 341 million.

Everyone else gained as the total queries jumped from 7.6 billion in May to 8 billion in June. Microsoft's rise, attributed to its Club Live promotion driving more use of Live Search, just grabbed more of what was available in its 36 percent increase in query volume.

People aren't switching away from Yahoo or Google. Microsoft just experienced a welcome increase in search traffic.

Yahoo had 244.6 million paid clicks in June. That represented a 32 percent increase year over year, and a 12.7 percent rise from May. Google led with 469.4 million paid clicks in June, while Microsoft trailed Yahoo in gathering 101.6 million paid clicks for the month.