Google, Microsoft Grow Search Share

In the closely watched monthly ranking of search engine providers, Google and Microsoft posted small gains in October, but Yahoo, which partners with Microsoft on some technology, slipped. The results were announced by digital measuring market research firm comScore.

comScore noted that the search results represented the second month that Google’s new Instant Search features have been included in comScore’s rankings. Google moved ahead 0.2 percentage points, to a 66.3% market share, while Microsoft rose 0.3%, to 11.5% for the month. Yahoo dropped 0.2%, to a 16.5% market share. The remaining two search engines in the rankings also dropped -- 0.1% for Ask Network, to 3.6%, and AOL LLC Network fell 0.2%, to 2.1%. Ask’s results include the company’s new question-and-answer approach to search.

Google led with 11.0 billion explicit core searches out of the entire 16.6 searches conducted in October, according to comScore. Next, in order, were Yahoo with 2.7 billion searches, Microsoft, 1.9 billion; Ask Network, 598 million; and AOL, 346 million.

Search results excluded Facebook, which recently overtook Google as the Web's top online destination.

Google's Instant Search feature helped the company increase some of its rankings, according to comScore. The market research firm noted that Microsoft’s Bing service is composed of Bing results as well as Yahoo Web Search, Yahoo Image Search, and Yahoo Video Search.

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