Google, Bing Grow in December

Search trends haven't changed much in the final month of 2010, mirroring the moves from the entire year. Yahoo lost market share, Bing gained a small slice and Google basically stood flat. The exact numbers differ, but the trends are the same both with Hitwise and with comScore data.

"Google accounted for 69.67 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Jan. 1, 2011. Bing-powered search received 25.77 percent of searches for the month, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 15.17 percent and 10.60 percent, respectively," Hitwise writes.

The biggest mover was Bing, which grew by 5 percent in the last month, getting 10.60 of the market.

Yahoo didn't move in either direction, but the combined market share of the two Bing-powered search engines grew by 2 percent, reaching 25.77 percent.

Google slid slightly below 70 percent market share, but the move is too small to indicate a trend.

Meanwhile, comScore, which uses a different method to measure market share and only focuses on the top five search engines in the US, showed much of the same.

Google gained a bit of market share, reaching 66.6 percent, the highest ever number of the dominating search engine.

Yahoo continued its downward trend, with the loss accelerating, going from 16.4 percent in November to just 16 percent in the last month.

Bing is picking up the slack though and now has 12 percent of the US core market, up from 11.8 percent in the previous month.

Overall, there's nothing that surprising. Google dominates search, but has a fairly stable market share, with the occasional ups and downs. Yahoo is slowly and surely losing its users, which are jumping to Bing and some perhaps to Google. And Bing is continuing its climb, grabbing some market share, though mostly from Yahoo.