RESTON, Virginia: Google Inc. has increased its share of the search market in the United States by 0.4 per cent to 47.4 per cent in December, while Yahoo! gained 0.3 per cent to keep the second place with 28.5 per cent, according to the monthly search analysis by web audience research firm comScore Networks.
The analysis put Microsoft Corp. at No 3 position, whose share got reduced 0.5 per cent to 10.5 per cent. The share of Ask.com too declined 0.1 per cent to 5.4 per cent.
comScore said Google's share of the search markets in the country had recorded gains in the last 16 of the 17 months.
The firm also brought out data showing an estimated 6.7 billion searches were conducted by U.S. web users during December, which is 1 per cent higher than the figure for November. The number of search queries from U.S. net users rose 30 per cent since 2005, the firm said. Consumers performed 3.2 billion searches on Google and 1.9 billion searches on Yahoo.