February is a critical time of the year for me personally. I have a lot on the line. Not only is February the month when Saint Valentine, the patron saint of Hallmark comes around, but it also happens to be the month of my wife’s birthday, and my mother’s birthday. Ouch! That is a lot of opportunity for trips to the dog house to come my way. Fortunately, I made it through the gauntlet relatively unscathed this year. In contrast to my own luck (read as: recurring annual reminders on cell phone), February was not too kind to the majority of the big search players. Of course February was kind once again to the biggest fish in the pond despite plenty of less than stellar market buzz.

Google officially crossed the 70% mark for the first time in February, according to Compete search market share numbers. 7 out of 10 web search queries performed in the US were performed on Google! The march up and to the right just doesn’t stop. Google’s search volumes have grown on average 3% per month since February last year, resulting in total year-over-year gains of over 50%. Obviously the story isn’t so rosy for the other players in the space.

The pain at Yahoo! is not limited to Jerry Yang coming to grips with potentially being the Silicon Valley subsidiary of the mighty Microsoft. February was another tough month for Yahoo! search as volumes declined nearly 7% from January and market share fell another point. MSN/Live search in turn dropped nearly 4% on the volume side resulting in a market share loss of about 0.3ppts. That’s a combined Microhoo market share loss of 1.3ppts since January 2008 and 7.1ppts since February 2007.

In other news Ask has thrown in the towel and decided to focus on working women. Then again maybe they aren’t … or are they? We’ll have to wait and see on that one, but one thing is for sure, despite February’s slight volume declines, Ask has been on the upswing over the past year. Ask query volumes were up nearly 56% since February 2007.

The overview …

• Google hits the big 70 for market share as the march goes on
• Yahoo! just can’t seem to escape the slippery slope dropping another point of market share
• MSN/Live seems to have caught some of the Yahoo! blues with market share off month-over-month and year-over-year
• Ask may or may not be for the overworked working woman, but they seem to be holding steady at large
• AOL ticked up in February on small gains and remains up year-over-year
• Is it any surprise that Saint Patrick comes to town with green beverages in tow right after Saint Valentine marches through?

* Search market share includes web search only for the Adult US Online Population and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.

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