WebProNews

Shorter month, right?

An across the board 5 percent drop in US search queries last month probably should be attributed to a naturally occurring phenomenon - fewer days in the month.

The latest report out of comScore on US search market share for the major engines has Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft in their accustomed places. Google leads, Yahoo follows, Microsoft trails both.

Less time in February, even with the appearance of a leap year day, kept the overall volume of queries down to 13.8 billion, spread across the search engines and other heavily visited sites that see lots of searches.

Smaller pie for February, but guess who ate a bigger piece of it? If you're picturing Eric Schmidt with a bib and a fork asking for more, congratulations. Google took 59.2 percent of the queries by comScore's reckoning.

Analysis by Citigroup's Mark Mahaney, featured over on Silicon Alley Insider, said Google's growth in the share of queries it received trailed that of previous months. "GOOG's U.S. query growth of 26% marked a deceleration vs. 37% growth in January and 40% growth in Q4," he noted.

Meanwhile, Yahoo's seems to have yielded some of its slice of the yummy pie to Google. Where Google rose percentage-wise from 58.5 in January to its 59.2 percent last month, Yahoo moved from 22.2 percent of search queries to 21.6.

Perhaps Jerry Yang's claims of a brighter Yahoo future should be viewed as a little dimmer than advertised. Silicon Alley Insider thinks Google will end up with 80 percent or more of the global share of search by the close of 2009.

If Google's growth really continues to slow, we have to wonder if they can hit 80 to 90 percent of search market share before they hit a point where they aren't pulling any more share from rival companies. Yahoo and Microsoft have a core of searchers that hasn't changed all that much over the past couple of years.

For Google to become some kind of search monolith, a lot of people will have to abandon using Yahoo or Microsoft's search at all. That might be a stretch to consider as likely.