Microsoft, Yahoo tied up in traffic
C|Net | at | by Mike
Microsoft released a Web traffic report Thursday that showed its MSN site beating rival Yahoo in the contest for top search engine, a ranking that was immediately disputed by the Web portal. The software giant said MSN Search had more than 32 million unique users in the United States, compared to Yahoo Search's 29 million users. Yahoo, however, refutes the claim, saying the numbers come from a custom report the software giant asked a third-party research firm to create. Yahoo said a lot of MSN Search queries are "involuntary." Those searches are prompted by people who typed a misspelled or nonexistent domain name into the address bar of Internet Explorer and were automatically redirected to Microsoft's search engine, a feature the software giant quietly added to its browser in September.