WebProNews

Another month, another Nielsen Online data set.  Only the unexpected has happened, and this time around, Google's market share didn't rise.

Google remained perfectly steady with a 58.7 percent share of searches in March, according to the latest numbers.  Yahoo managed to gain a bit of ground, moving from 17.6 percent to 18.1 percent, and MSN/Windows Live Search also went up, hitting 12.0 percent following its February standing of 11.2 percent.

 Nielsen Online's March Data

Things were rather more dramatic in terms of year-over-year growth.  After acknowledging that almost 4.8 billion searches were performed on Google in March, Nielsen reported that the company achieved a rise of 25.5 percent since the same period last year.  MSN/Windows Live Search did even better, with 36.6 percent growth.

Yahoo and AOL dragged their feet, however, registering declines of 4.5 percent and 19.4 percent, respectively.

It should be interesting to see what happens next month; the idea of Google always getting stronger is a bit of an exaggeration, but it's come true more often than not.  Also, it might not be much longer before another slash and Yahoo's name get added to the "MSN/Windows Live Search" entity.