On Monday, Microsoft heralded a search distribution deal with market-leading PC manufacturer Hewlett-Packard. All HP consumer PCs shipped in the U.S. and Canada, beginning in January 2009, will arrive with Microsoft’s Live Search-enabled toolbar.
“This agreement with HP is a strategic indicator of our increased focus on securing broad-scale distribution for Live Search,” said Kevin Johnson, president of the platforms and services division at Microsoft. “This is the most significant distribution deal for Live Search that Microsoft has ever done.”
Will HP Give Microsoft a Search Edge?
Specifically, Microsoft is building a custom, Live Search-enabled toolbar for HP customers that aims to leverage the user-experience capabilities of Microsoft Silverlight. The toolbar will offer HP customization capabilities within the buttons on the toolbar to provide quick access to online services and tools, such as Snapfish, HP’s online photo service, and HP customer support.
“This deal is potentially big. It puts Live Search and Silverlight in front of a lot of HP buyers,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “Consumers are typically fairly passive about changing default settings, so this could translate into some added usage for Live Search.”
As part of the deal, the default search engine setting in the browser on all HP consumer PCs will be set to Microsoft Live Search. That puts Microsoft closer to Google in terms of the number of PC-search distribution deals with major PC manufacturers. Microsoft has deals with Lenovo and HP. Google has deals with Apple, Dell and Toshiba. Yahoo is preinstalled on Acer computers.
Challenging Google’s Search Inertia
Still, Google reigns supreme. In April, Americans conducted 10.6 billion core searches, with Google continuing to gain market share as the leading search engine, according to comScore. Also in April, Google extended its share of core searches to 61.6 percent, up from 59.8 percent the previous month. Yahoo…