With the majority of data leads sold over the LeadPoint exchange generated from Internet searches it is important (particularly for lead sellers, but also lead buyers) to pay attention to U.S. Internet search engine trends.

July 2009 total U.S. searches increased 5% over June 2009 figures, according to data from The Nielsen Company. In absolute searches this amounted to 10.5 billion searches in July versus 10 billion in June. What is interesting is that Google’s share of the total search market decreased from 66.1% to 64.8% despite the fact that Google’s absolute searches grew 3% from 6.6 billion to 6.8 billion.

Gaining market share on Google were Yahoo Search and Microsoft’s suite of search sites (MSN, Windows Live and Bing). Yahoo grew its month-over-month search figures 11% from 1.6 billion in June to 1.8 billion in July. In doing so, Yahoo attained a 17.1% share of the U.S. search market, up from 16.2% in June.

Microsoft grew its month-over-month search figures 8% from 880 million searches in June to 947 million searches in July. Microsoft search products tallied a 9% market share in July, up from an 8.8% share in June.

These June and July figures represent the first published results by Nielsen from their new MegaView Search methodology. Because of the new methodology changes, this data – and all related search figures from Nielsen – cannot be trended with results that were collected by the company before June 2009.

With only two months of data it is premature to draw any real conclusions from these figures. Even so, with these results and all the hoopla in the media about Bing and how it will replace Yahoo’s proprietary search engine, it is something worth paying attention to. Should Google see a decline in its overall search market share it could have large effects on the online advertising industry.

Competition could help to drive down keyword prices on Google and within the search engine industry in general. If Google’s market share continues to decline advertisers would need to spend more of their advertising on competitor search engines to reach the full consumer online market. There would likely be increased competition between the search engines for advertising budgets. How it would affect the cost of leads is unclear as there would also be additional costs to maintain campaigns across multiple search engines versus a single search engine which might offset declines in keyword costs.

Managing lead generation advertising campaigns would likely become more complex. If market share becomes more spread out across search engines it likely would require advertisers (who may have relied primarily on Google) to spread their advertising over multiple search engines to maintain or grow lead volume. This would likely increase the complexity of online advertising and provide an even greater incentive for those without this specialization or the time to focus on it to purchase leads in order to reach online consumers.

For all of us in the online space, it will be interesting to see how the search engine competition progresses.