• by May 23, 2006

Surprise, surprise. Google gained market share in the U.S. for the ninth consecutive month, according to comScore Networks' qSearch analysis for the month of April.

In April, Google increased its market share and leadership position with 43.1 percent of all U.S. searches conducted on its sites. Yahoo logged in at No. 2 with 28 percent, while MSN ranked third with 12.9 percent.

Yahoo's 28 percent share represents a 2.7 percent drop from April 2005. MSN had a 16.1 percent market share a year ago. And Ask.com, despite its recent launch of a big marketing campaign, actually experienced a slight downturn, tracking 5.9 percent versus 6.1 percent a year ago.

Meanwhile, comScore says Americans conducted 6.6 billion searches online in April, up 4 percent from March. Google sites led the market, with 2.9 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.9 billion), MSN-Microsoft (858 million), the Time-Warner Network (457 million), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (384 million).

MySpace.com was added to the search engine rankings for April 2006, coming in at 6th place with 43 million search queries performed (0.6 percent share of the U.S. search market). Google and Yahoo continue to dominate among toolbar searches, combining for more than 95 percent of the market share in April. Google grabbed 48.0 percent of toolbar searches, while Yahoo captured 47.6 percent.

The comScore qSearch analysis includes Web searches originating from the search engines reported, other Web-based searches such as News and Image searches, and channel searches conducted on portal sites (e.g., Finance and Movies). The analysis doesn't include Yellow Pages or Maps searches.