• Compete , Wednesday, April 9, 2008 1 PM

Another month, another search market share report. Google's first, Yahoo's second and Microsoft is a distant third... yawn. But according to Compete, March's search market share report is actually full of madness--and its all because of an almost 30% jump in monthly search volume for MSN.

Queries on MSN Live Search shot up by 28.8%, increasing the software giant's overall market share up to slightly over 10%. "My guess is that there are some dollars flowing out of Redmond that may be driving this," says Jeremy Crane. Though Crane and the Compete team aren't exactly sure what drove the search volume spike, he was quick to note that they filtered out all of MSN's gimmicky "pay to search" and "play to search" promotions.

"We dug pretty deep into it before posting to make sure it was not a weird data thing," Crane says. "As a side note we currently remove all Club Live search activity so while it could be a related promotional

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