The latest rankings from Nielsen show that Google is still dominating the US search market by a significant margin. However, the company's share dropped slightly as its closest rivals continued to gain.
Google accounted for an astounding 64.2 per cent of the market last month, which translates to more than 5.5 billion searches during the course of July. However, this was around four per cent fewer searches than the previous month, representing a drop of over 230 million.
Yahoo! placed in a distant second, accounting for 14.3 per cent of the market, or around 1.2 billion searches.
Microsoft's Bing followed closely in third, claiming 13.6 per cent. This was an increase of over 50 per cent from the same time last year, showing just how successful the company's marketing efforts for its 'decision engine' have been.
Of course, with the Bing-Yahoo! search deal now in full effect, next months results may look very different. The combined numbers could mean that Microsoft holds almost 30 per cent of the US search market - giving it a very significant minority for the first time.
Rounding out the top five are Ask and AOL, who together manage to command only four per cent of the search market.
While these statistics are from America, the picture in the UK isn't that different. Numbers from last month attribute approximately the same market share to each of the top three, within a few points. With Bing likely to start providing search results to Yahoo! UK in the near future, the search engine could start to make a serious challenge to Google's dominance.
