The Internet and blog world didn't seem to get too excited about the market share Microsoft (MSFT) grabbed from Google (GOOG) in June for search. It's possible that it's being considered a blip on the record and isn't going to be sustainable.
What will be a huge story, is if this does become a sustainable model that continues to eat into Google's market share. At this type of pace it could do serious damage over a relatively small period of time.
My colleague at webmetricsguru doesn't think the model Microsoft is using will be sustainable, saying, "It looks like MSN/Live took a big chunk of it's Search Share gain from Google... But if '...A good portion of the additional Live searches are coming from the Live Search Club, where you can apparently play games for points which you can redeem for fine Microsoft products...' then the gain, if real, is probably not sustainable."
There seems to be no doubt the gain is real or we probably would have heard about it already. The question of sustainability is a real one of course, but I think whether it will go on or not will depend on several things.
The first one is how long users will continue to use the point system in exchange for searches. This could possibly be sustainable over a period of time if Microsoft offers unique, creative alternatives once the initial offerings grow old.
The second point is if this does eat into Googles' share for another month or so, it won't be like Google will stand still. They'll probably start their own program to compete against Microsoft; as the other major search engines would probably do too.
The question then comes of whether that would simply settle things down into where things were before. This isn't exactly a difficult program to copy, although some of the gifts received through the Live Search Club program are unique to Microsoft, which aren't reproducable.
Steve Willis at Compete, who blogged on this said, “If Microsoft can actually leverage this traffic to club.live.com into actual search users and string together a few more months like this, they could really threaten Google’s top spot.”
Here's what I think is even more important with all this: If Microsoft is able to sustain this, they will have not only become a challenger to Google, but more importantly, they will be seen as a leader again, rather than a follower in this space (I know other small sites do this), among the big search companies.
Updated Graph Without Microsoft Live Search Club
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