• by Tameka Kee , December 26, 2007

Americans conducted some 10 billion searches on the core search engines in November, a 5% dip from October, according to the latest comScore qSearch analysis.

comScore analysts say that November's 30-days can make it a softer month seasonally than previous months, and it showed, as queries were down across all five of the major search engines--with the sharpest decline on Yahoo search (down nearly 7%). That was followed closely by Ask's decrease of 6%, while searches on MSN and Google were down by 5% and 4%, respectively. Time Warner's AOL was the only search engine to show increased volume, with an uptick of roughly 2.4%.

Despite the downward trend, Google still reigned supreme in terms of search market share, snagging about 59% of the market with 5.9 billion core searches. Yahoo remained in second place with its 23%, while Microsoft snagged nearly 10%. Ask and Time Warner each held on to about 4.5% of the search market--and all five core search providers retained roughly the same amount of market share as in October.

In terms of comScore's expanded search rankings which include queries across social networking, maps and shopping sites, total queries were down by about 4%--with the a number of the drops (and a few boosts) influenced by holiday seasonality.

For example, both eBay and Amazon saw increases in search volume, likely due to the onset of the holiday shopping season. Users conducted some 178 million searches on Amazon, a 22% increase, and searches on eBay lifted by about 4% to reach 489 million. And despite the increase in road travel related to Thanksgiving, searches on Time Warner's MapQuest dropped by nearly 17%.

In the social networking race, News Corp.'s MySpace and Facebook both saw double-digit drops--with slumps of 10% and roughly 22%, respectively. Meanwhile, video searches on Google's YouTube jumped up by 9%.