comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in March with 66.4 percent of search queries conducted.

U.S. Explicit Core Search

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in March with 66.4 percent market share, followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.3 percent and Yahoo! Sites with 13.7 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent.*"Explicit Core Search" excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.

18.4 billion explicit core searches were conducted in March, with Google Sites ranking first with 12.2 billion (up 4 percent). Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.8 billion searches (up 5 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.5 billion (up 4 percent), Ask Network with 555 million (up 4 percent) and AOL, Inc. with 285 million (up 7 percent).In March, 68.6 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google, while 25.9 percent of searches were powered by Bing (versus 26.2 percent in February).