The latest Web statistics from Compete may indicate that the close integration of Windows Live Search in the new Windows Visa operating system is paying off for Microsoft.

Compete reports that MSN/Live now has a market share of 9 percent compared to 8 percent in January. As regards web search volume Live Search increased by 10% to nearly 590 million queries in February. This should be good news for Microsoft, a company that has seen its search performance decline steadily lately.

The Windows Live Search growth came to late for Microsoft’s search boss Christopher Payne, though. He is now leaving the company.

Still, it is not all good news for MSN/Live Search. The main competitor Google continues to climb, totally dominating the search market. The February market share of Google is now 68 percent, one point higher than in January.

Compete counts some 4 billion web search queries on Google in February; that’s a 15 percent gain since February 2006 (3 percent compared to last month).

The relevant numbers are 21 percent for Yahoo! (down two points) and 3 percent for Ask (down one point).

So where does Compete get these numbers? Compete says that the company bases its site traffic and engagement metrics on the daily browsing activity of over 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users:

“Compete members are recruited through multiple sources, including ISPs, the Compete Toolbar and additional opt-in panels to ensure a diverse distribution of user types and to facilitate de-biasing across the data sources.”

By the way, Compete presents a useful alternative to the Alexa site traffic statistics. By using the Comstat SnapShot tool you may use the Compete two million database to track the popularity of your own site. Note that these are U.S. figures only, though.

See also: Microsoft To Improve Search Results (Unofficial SEO Blog)