• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 5, 2008

Search engines are proving to be resilient despite the worsening economy, according to a new study from AdGooroo, a provider of Web marketing data and keyword tools.

"Google's active advertiser count is a whopping 54.9% higher than it was in the fourth quarter of 2007," said AdGooroo founder and CEO Rich Stokes. "This runs counter to what we hear in the marketplace today."

Microsoft, meanwhile, increased its share of advertisers by an estimated 11.5% from the third quarter of this year, the study finds.

"Some of this growth can be attributed to general year-over-year growth in consumer search usage, but Google has clearly adjusted their algorithm to serve more ads to consumers in each search in order to generate this impressive growth in first-page advertisers," Stokes says.

Indeed, the fourth quarter of this year may be the strongest quarter on record for both Google and Microsoft, he says.

"We've proven in previous reports that ad coverage on the search engines provides a leading indicator of advertising activity," added Stokes. "The (fourth-quarter) data we analyzed shows Google has increased its ad coverage back to their January 2008 levels."

The data actually observed that first-page Google ads increased from a low of 2.4 ads per search in September to 4.4 ads per search in December.

Yahoo--which demonstrated the worst performance of all leading search engines--increased its active advertiser count, while its U.S. and international share of advertisers dropped from 30.4% in September to 20.4% in November.