Bing search gaining ground on Google: comScore

Industry tracking firm comScore on Friday reported that Microsoft's Bing gained ground on Google in the lucrative Internet search market in January.

Google continued to dominate, handling 65.6 percent of "explicit core" online queries, but Bing's share grew about a percent from December while Google's slid by about the same amount.

About 16.1 percent of US online searches were done at Yahoo! websites, which are powered by Bing. Bing's handling of 13.1 percent of searches brought its total share of the load to 29.2 percent.

Ask accounted for 3.4 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL Network with 1.7 percent, according to comScore.

Nearly 17 billion online searches were conducted in the United States in January, with Google tending to 11.1 billion of them, comScore reported.