Google Sites led the US explicit core search* market in December 2010, accounting for 66.6% of total searches conducted during the month, followed by Yahoo Sites with 16.0% and Microsoft Sites with 12.0%, according to data from comScore qSearch.
Ask and AOL rounded out the top 5 with 3.5% and 1.9%, respectively.
Total Core Search Queries
More than 16.4 billion explicit core searches were conducted in December, up 3% from November. Google Sites ranked first with 11.0 billion searches, up 3% from the previous month, followed by Yahoo Sites with 2.6 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.0 billion (up 4%).
Ask accounted for 575 million explicit core searches, followed by AOL with 213 million, down 5% from November.
Total Core Search
Google Sites accounted for 64.3% of total core search queries conducted in December, followed by Yahoo Sites with 18.8% and Microsoft Sites with 12.0%. Ask comprised 3.2% of total search queries, followed by AOL with 1.7%.
Americans conducted over 18.2 billion total core search queries in December. Google Sites led with 11.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo Sites with 3.4 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.2 billion.
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"Powered By" Reporting
Google's "powered by" share is composed of searches conducted at Google entities, as well as branded searches at AOL and Ask. Bing's powered by share is composed of searches conducted at Microsoft entities as well as branded Yahoo entities.
In December, 69.4% of searches carried organic search results from Google, while 24.4% searches were powered by Bing organic results.
* Explicit core search is defined by comScore as user engagement with a search service with the intent to retrieve search results.
