comScore Releases December U.S. Search Engine Rankings; Google Sites Leading

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in December with 65.9 percent of search queries conducted.

Google Sites (NASDAQ: GOOG) led the U.S. explicit core search market in December with 65.9 percent market share (up 0.5 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites (NASDAQ: MSFT) with 15.1 percent (up 0.1 percentage points) and Yahoo! Sites (NASDAQ: YHOO) with 14.5 percent. Ask Network accounted for 2.9 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. (NYSE: AOL) with 1.6 percent.

More than 18.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in December (up 2 percent). Google Sites ranked first with 12 billion (up 3 percent), followed by Microsoft Sites with 2.7 billion (up 2 percent) and Yahoo! Sites with 2.6 billion. Ask Network delivered 531 million searches (up 3 percent), while AOL, Inc. rounded out the top five with 287 million.

Google Sites accounted for 66.1 percent of total core search queries conducted (up 0.4 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.2 percent and Microsoft Sites with 13.8 percent. Ask Network comprised 2.6 percent of total search queries, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.4 percent.

Americans conducted 20.5 billion total core search queries in December (up 3 percent). Google Sites ranked first with 13.6 billion searches (up 4 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 3.3 billion (up 2 percent) and Microsoft Sites with 2.8 billion (up 2 percent).