Bangalore: Google outpaced Microsoft for the first time to become the second richest tech company in the world behind Apple. The search giant is now valued at a market capital of $ 249.13 billion compared to Microsoft’s $ 247.23 billion. But both the companies are way far behind Apple, which has a market capital of $ 618.12 billion.

The reason for Google’s gradual raise can be directly linked to the increased computing over the Internet, which reduces demand for software installed on desktop machines. “The PC hardware business is obviously struggling,” said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst at Wedge Partners Corp to Bloomberg. “The transition here is pretty straightforward in terms of where things have moved to and certainly that’s cloud, that’s Web.

Google’s been instrumental in the growth of the Internet as the delivery channel for more of the software and computing tasks that were once left to the Microsoft-dominated PC industry. Google grew phenomenally from being a search engine to an advertising powerhouse and lately into hardware, which makes use of the world’s most popular mobile operating system, Android.

Even though Microsoft also has a platform like Google search- the Bing, it was not at all able to catch any significant market share in the space. According to ComScore, Google controls 66 percent of the U.S. search market compared to Microsoft, which stands in the second position with 16 percent.

In the coming days, analysts see the growth of Google’s value, powered by the Android OS and the range of hardware including Nexus series tablets and phones.