The January search rankings are out and Bing should be pretty happy.

In Dec 2011 When Bing claimed the number 2 spot in December 2011, many speculated that it wouldn’t last. However, the January 2012 statistics have rolled around and guess what…? It has retained the number 2 position with its market share at over 15.1% now, while Yahoo remains in 3rd position with 14.5% market share.

The January 2012 search market share results can be summed up as :

• Unsurprisingly, Google bags the first place with 66.2% share (up 0.3% points from previous month)
• Bing retains second position with 15.2% (up 0.1% points from December 2011)
• Yahoo stills sits in third place at 14.1 percent (down buy 0.4% from previous month)
• Ask now claims 3 percent of the market (up by 0.1 point)
• AOL remained unchanged at 1.6 percent

ComScore says that 17.8 billion explicit core searches were conducted in January in the US; Google Sites dominated with 11.8 billion. Microsoft Sites with 2.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.5 billion, Ask Network with 527 million and AOL, Inc. with 277 million.

Americans performed nearly 20 billion total core search queries; Google Sites got 13.2 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 3.2 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.8 billion. The graph below shows the percentage values for each search engine.

In January, 68.4% of organic search results were powered by Google (vs. 68.1 % in December) while 26.5 % of searches came from Bing (no change from December).

Google’s share hasn’t been this high since December 2010, when Google commanded 66.2% of the search market, according to comScore.

January shows that Google, despite all the angst and concern amongst search insiders (remember Search Plus Your World?), is holding steady with two-thirds of US searchers using Google as their search engine of choice.