Yahoo! increased its share of the US search market by nearly a percentage point in April and Microsoft's new search engine Bing also recorded a slight gain, online tracking firm comScore said Tuesday. In April 2010, Americans conducted 15.5 billion core searches, with Google Sites leading the market with 64.4 percent share of core searches conducted, comScore said.

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in April with 64.4 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (up 0.8 percentage points to 17.7 percent), and Microsoft Sites (up 0.1 percentage points to 11.8 percent). Both Yahoo! Sites and Microsoft Sites have experienced gains due in part to the introduction of new site navigation experiences that tie content and related search results together within several channels. These features provide search results to users as they navigate through topical content and meet comScore?s established criteria for counting search queries. Ask Network captured 3.7 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.4 percent.



Bing is enjoying steady gains in the U.S. search market. Yahoo! and Microsoft unveiled a 10-year Web search and advertising partnership in July that set the stage for a joint offensive against Google.

ComScore said Americans conducted 15.5 billion searches in April, up slightly from March. Google Sites accounted for 10 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.8 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.8 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (371 million).

In the April analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the search market with 14.0 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.8 billion queries and Microsoft Sites with 1.9 billion. Amazon Sites experienced sizeable growth during the month with an 8-percent increase to 245 million searches, rounding off the top 10 ranking.