According to ComScore’s latest qSearch analysis report, Google continues to lead the search market with 65.9% of search queries in December conducted in the US search marketplace. However, in a surprising change of events, Microsoft (Bing) climbed up to the second place with 15.1% pushing Yahoo! down to the third spot.

December 2011 saw 68.1% of searches come from organic search results on Google (vs. 67.6% in November) while 26.5% of searches were powered by Bing (vs. 26.7% in November).

U.S. Explicit Core Search
Out of the 18.2 billion+ explicit core searches conducted in December, Google continued to dominate the search market shares with 12 billion, followed by Microsoft with 2.7 billion and Yahoo!  in third place with 2.6 billion. Ask Network accounted for 531 million searches and AOL 287 million searches last month.

U.S. Total Core Search
For the total core searches conducted in the U.S. alone, Google contributed a total of 66.1 %  (a 0.4% increase from the Nov’11 reports), followed by Yahoo! with 16.2 % and Microsoft with 13.8 %. Ask Network and AOL Inc. made it to the top 5 with 2.6 % and 1.4% of the total search queries conducted.

Although a significant change on the charts, Microsoft doesn’t really have much to celebrate since it powers both the Yahoo and Bing searches, therefore this growth comes at the expense of Yahoo. If you recall, Yahoo! agreed to give away its searches to Microsoft (under the partnership agreement) in order to save money.

The question now is whether or not can Bing keep their small lead from December? If this lead is a result of the Yahoo partnership, then yes we can expect Bing to continue growing but if not, then we are probably set to see the two companies swap positions many times through this year.

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