• February 19, 2009

In January 2009, Americans conducted 13.5 billion core searches, a 7% gain versus December 2008, according to comScore's monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace.

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in December with 63% of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo Sites (21%), Microsoft Sites (8.5%), AOL LLC (3.9%) and Ask Network (3.7%). The analysis is based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Google Sites handled 8.5 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo Sites with 2.8 billion and Microsoft Sites with 1.1 billion. In the comScore January 2009 analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led with 11.7 billion searches, up 5% versus December. Yahoo Sites ranked second with nearly 3 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (1.2 billion) and AOL LLC (781 million).--Tanya Irwin