Who uses MS Live Search - on purpose?

No one. Net Applications monthly newsletter posed an interesting question: who uses MS Live Search?

Nobody I know.

One of their engineers theorized

. . . it's mostly people that are searching for files on their own hard drive who accidentally click the 'search the net' button.

Hm-m, how could you tell? If that theory is correct almost all Live Search sessions would come from Windows systems running IE.

Sure enough, they found that an overwhelming 99.82% of all Live Search sessions are Windows machines running IE.

A 90% market share is good for something It kept the Live Search market at a pathetic 2.4% last month - instead of a humiliating 0%.

IE's market share is 75% If Firefox - 18% market share - users were just as likely to use Live Search as any other search engine, you'd expect to see 18% of Live Searches on that browser. Or 1/10th the chance is a 1.8% share.

But the distant #2 OS on Windows Live Search? Mac OS with a 0.17% share. All hail Microsoft's loyal Mac business unit!

The Storage Bits take Search is THE problem as storage capacities grow. Microsoft's weak showing means they aren't going to beat Google at the current game. MS needs to put it's substantial muscle finding the Next Big Thing in search.

It also suggests that taking over Yahoo won't help either - they haven't had any better luck against Google. Put 2 losers together and you just have a bigger loser.

Comments welcome, of course.