Even in spite of Goldberg's efforts launching a number of attempts at gaining search market share for Live Search, according to comScore the search service still lags far behind in terms of market share, capturing only 8.5% of all search queries in October, compared to Google's 63.1% and Yahoo's 20.5%.

Also according to the Bishop article, Goldberg will be replaced by Microsoft veteran Mike Nichols at the beginning of the year. Nichols previously worked in strategic partnerships for Yusuf Mehdi, who himself was recently named to the post of Senior Vice President of its online audience business, overseeing properties including MSN and Live Search. Prior to that, Nichols was in search engineering.

Goldberg joined Microsoft in 1997 and has participated in numerous Microsoft business areas including servers, developer tools and Windows. Goldberg will remain in the Seattle area. His wife, Michelle Goldberg, is a partner at Ignition Partners, a well-known Seattle venture capital firm.