With Microsoft’s recent decision to drop its purchase of Yahoo, the pressure is on Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer to make his money-losing Internet business succeed against Google, says a report in Bloomberg.com.

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The danger for Microsoft, says the article, is that Google, “will expand its dominance while Ballmer plans a new course. Google gained 10 percentage points of market share in Internet queries since June, providing 59.8 per cent of the searches done in March”.

With Yahoo, says Bloomberg.com, Microsoft would “have tripled its share of U.S. online searches and would have become the biggest seller of graphical- display ads on the Internet”.

This would have been enough to reverse the fortunes of Microsoft Internet unit, which lost $US228 million last quarter.

The other option for Microsoft, says the report, is to pursue other acquisitions, such as Time Warner’s AOL, to win more Internet visitors, or to go after News Corp.’s MySpace social- networking site.

However noted most analysts, there are no other properties around of the size of Yahoo that can be bought up by Microsoft.

As for Google, it will continue to benefit from the collapse of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal as web sites around the world decide it is the safe choice during troubled times for search ads.