• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, August 22, 2005

Despite the emergence of several niche search engines over the past year, the big six--Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask Jeeves, and InfoSpace--have actually tightened their grip on the market, comScore Media Metrix reported on Friday. The pack's share of total searches increased from 98.5 percent in July 2004 to 99.4 percent by July 2005, according to comScore's monthly qSearch analysis.

The U.S. search market as a whole grew at a healthy pace, as the total volume of searches increased 22 percent year-over-year to over 4.8 billion, comScore reported.

Google maintained its lead in the United States with 36.5 percent of all the searches in the month of July--followed by Yahoo! at 30.5 percent and MSN at 15.5 percent, according to comScore.

Following a marketing campaign, Microsoft's MSN earned the greatest search volume gain among any of the top search engines, rising 30 percent year-over-year and accounting for 744 million domestic searches, according to comScore.

comScore's Media Metrix also noted that while the popularity of search toolbars has mellowed over the past year, usage remains high, particularly among Yahoo! users.

In July of this year, 11 percent of all searches in the United States were conducted via toolbars, up from 8 percent in July 2004. Yahoo! remains the most popular toolbar, serving as the starting point for 51 percent of all toolbar searches executed in July. Yahoo! toolbars processed more than 282 million searches during the month, a 74 percent increase over the previous year.