ComScore: Microhoo now with 28.5 percent combined U.S. search share

The August comScore numbers are out, with that firm claiming that Microsoft and Yahoo now have a collective 28.5 percent of U.S. search share, compared to Google with 65.4 percent.

According to comScore's calculations, that means Microsoft's U.S. share is up one-tenth of a percentage point and Yahoo's up three-tenths (if those two were still operating separately).

Twenty-nine percent sounds a lot better than 11 percent (which is what Microsoft's Bing captured, U.S.-share-wise in July). And with Microsoft now providing Yahoo with Bing results in North America, the Microhoo team is now basically the Bing team. And Google's four-tenths of a percentage point loss was the Bing team's gain, comScore said.

Speaking of Bing, I recently stumbled onto a job posting at Microsoft that mentioned a Microsoft search-related codename I hadn't heard before: Rankomatic. From that listing:

"We're developing a system called Rankomatic that can apply a bunch of algorithmic smarts to the problems of placing elements on the search page, ranking contents within those elements, and ultimately how to learn from user behavior in order to improve our system automatically. We'll be developing a continuously exploring system using the principles of A/B testing and applying them to many different features on the page on a continuous basis. In the process we'll be touching many different disciplines pertaining to ranking, evaluation, statistics, large-scale data analysis, and user behavior modeling."

Nothing earth-shattering here, but may be useful somewhere down the line....

And in other search news, there's a new blog on ZDNet that anyone interested in the black arts of SEO might be interested in following. It's called "SEO Whistleblower," and Chapman's been busy getting new content up there....