comScore Offers Search Engine Rankings For December 2009

The search market is highly competitive thanks the massive amounts of money that can be made from the ads displayed alongside search results. The search engines in the US battle for the dominant position with the top contenders being Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Google is by far the largest search engine in the US market and as expected, it claimed the top spot for December 2009 according to comScore. Google grabbed 65.7% of all searches for the month, up slightly from the previous month.

Yahoo had the second place sport with 17.3% of the searches conducted, down from 17.5% the previous month. Microsoft grew is portion of the search market slightly from 10.3% in November to 10.7% in December. Ask was fourth for the month with 3.7% of the market and AOL was fifth at 2.6%. I think Microsoft inflates its numbers a bit using anyone with MSN set as a home page. The site changes your cursor from the Google tool bar or address bar to the search field automatically as it loads. This means that you end up running a search you never meant to run frequently.