Google gains ground in US search market

Market-tracker comScore reported on Friday that Google finished 2010 strong, handling 66 percent of US online queries.

Factoring in outside websites with search "powered by" by the California Internet titan, its share of the market climbed even higher, with 69.4 percent of US searches getting "organic" results from Google.

Microsoft's Bing search engine increased its share of the US market slightly to 12 percent, while AOL, Ask, and Yahoo! each lost ground with 1.9, 3.5, and 16 percent respectively, according to comScore.

Bing handles Internet searches at Yahoo! websites, raising to 28 percent the total portion of US queries it tended to in December. The combined Bing-Yahoo! share of the market remained unchanged from November.

US Internet users conducted 18.2 billion online searches in December, with Google handling 11.7 billion while 3.4 billion were done at Yahoo! sites and 2.2 billion at Microsoft sites, according to comScore.