It's been a little over two years since Microsoft launched their own search engine to challenge Google and Yahoo. From the looks of things, that two years hasn't quite gone the way they had planned. The latest figures from Nielsen/NetRatings show a year over year drop in Microsoft search traffic and lets Google, Yahoo, Ask and even AOL brag about year over year increases. Let's take a look at how the numbers break down...

For the month of November, Google processed about 3.1 billion search queries. That's just under half of all the searches conducted last month. It also represents a 31% increase over the number of searches they processed last November. Yahoo, with 24.3% search share has logged a 27% increase over last November. AOL (6.2% share) had an 11% jump and Ask (2.6% share) has plenty to brag about with a 33% increase since last year. In fact, Ask had the highest growth rate of ALL the major search engines. Comparatively, Microsoft's Windows Live search has 8.2% share and showed a 12% drop in search traffic since last year.

It will be interesting to see how this all continues to shake down. Ask has been making great strides in terms of search experience, Yahoo! has just launched a new paid search advertising system and Google continues to charge ahead full steam. While Microsoft has potential, things just don't seem to be falling into place. With that in mind, I'll be curious to watch and see if more advertisers with limited budgets start to shift their spending from Windows Live to Ask.