It would not come as a surprise to anyone that Google accounts for a lion's share of the ad server market. On the contrary, it would shock everyone that Microsoft holds only the equivalent of a lion's paw.

In the month of October, Attributor, a content-tracking company, analyzed ad server calls across 75 million domains, and if adhered to the data Attributor released this week, Google--through DoubleClick and AdSense--accounts for 56.5 percent market share. On the other hand, Microsoft's equivalent figure sands at 3.8 percent. Behind Google, Yahoo comes 9.7 percent. It should be noted here that if Microsoft and Yahoo ever end up combining forces, they still wouldn't touch Google.

"Basically, a server call is the moment when a Web site requests an ad to serve up to a user. The study examined whose ad code was on that page," claims AdAge. com.

The Attributors' figures claim that DoubleClick and AdSense are definitely playing to different markets. While AdSense dominated the smaller sites so far, DoubleClick dominated the larger ones.

However, it should also be informed that it's not all good news for Google since back in the month of January, when Attributor last took a look at ad server calls, Google's AdSense and DoubleClick accounted for 69.7 percent share. That is a fall of more than 13 points.

Though Google didn't lose out to Microsoft, it lost little bits to a lot of other players, including AOL and Revenue Science.