Google, the world’s most dominating search engine player, has surprisingly witnessed a fall in its share in February 2008. The research company ‘comScore’ observed that Google’s share of the worldwide market for web search fell to 62.8 per cent in February from 63.1 per cent the month before.

The comScore search market data is used as a reference point by most search engine experts to draw conclusions about the subtle and significant changes happening in the Web search industry. The volume of US searches done through Google dropped from 6.14 billion to 5.86 billion in February, plus the worldwide volume of searches also declined.

In contrast, searches had risen by nine per cent in January over December 2007. The drop was partly owing to February being two days shorter in duration than January, a comScore spokesman pointed out. However, many analysts stated it might also be an indicator of a maturing market. “We’re continuing to witness deceleration in growth in web search,” according to the Jefferies & Co analyst, Youssef Squali, “Google’s month-over-month five per cent decline is a bit surprising, but all the major web-search names were down during this period.”