• April 13, 2009

Nielsen Online reported March 2009 data Friday for the top U.S. search engines. Searches grew an estimated 16.7% in March to 9.5 billion, compared with the year-ago month. The uptick suggests that paid search, search engine optimization (SEO) and online marketing campaigns remain vital.

About 6.1 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 64.2% of all search queries. Yahoo Search followed with 1.5 billion, taking 15.8% of market share; MSN Windows Live Search 983 million, 10.3%; AOL Search 357 million, 3.7%; and Ask.com Search at 198 million, 2.1%, respectively.

The remaining five search engines each had less than 0.6% market share. Both NextTag Search and Dogpile.com Search tied for last place with 0.2%. Nearly 60 million searches in March were done on My Web Search. Comcast Search followed with 58 million; Yellow Pages Search, 37 million; NexTag Search, 22 million; and Dogpile.com Search, 19 million.--Laurie Sullivan