WebProNews

Nielsen Online has released data regarding the August search market, and certain persistent trends were defied in small ways.  But a really interesting deviation popped up as the overall number of searches fell.

About 8.0 billion searches were performed in July (7.997 billion if you want to get specific).  During August, this number dropped to 7.2 billion, so a month-over-month loss of ten percent occurred.  On a year-over-year scale, the decrease looks more like 7.7 percent.  Not good, or at least not normal.

 Fewer Searches Performed In August
(Credit: Nielsen Ratings)

Did some big Internet outage take place that affected individuals forgot to mention?  Ike hadn't hit yet in August.  Or maybe the back-to-school crowd got overwhelmed by homework?  Feel free to toss out other scenarios using the comments section, as we're stumped.

Anyway, as for the other aspects of Nielsen's latest report, Google defied expectations by losing 0.2 percent of its market share since July.  Yahoo, meanwhile, managed to grow its share by 0.7 percent.  Only Microsoft played according to tradition and saw its number dip by 1.2 percent.

At least this strange search recession has created a bit of excitement.  Stay tuned to find out what the September stats look like.