Google has seen its web search market share fall some nought point three percentage points globally from January to February, according to comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world but, as an all-time crowd favorite would say, it's all good. The US share rose over the same period. The minuscule drop was however foreseen by the company, as its CEO Eric Schmidt announced somewhere at the beginning of the year that his company was prepared to face whatever the recession might throw at it. And to be honest, the only thing anyone has ever thrown at Google is money, through its AdSense and AdWords programs.

Google was not the only one to see its percentages fall in number of searches run through its search engine, Yahoo and Microsoft are facing a similar problem globally. In the United States, though, Google upped its percentages by 0.7 in core search, while the Sunnyvale-based company and the Redmond giant both took hits, 0.6 and 0.2 respectively.

Based on the Top 50 properties worldwide where search activity was observed in February, Google clearly leads the pack with 7.4 billion, followed by Yahoo with 2.3 billion and Microsoft, that counted 984 million. The chart provided by comScore reveals just how important the YouTube acquisition was for the Mountain View-based company. Compared to its counterparts from the other two major players in the field, the Google-owned video sharing site and other services had 1.554 billion searches run through them, while Yahoo!'s other bagged some 29 billion and Microsoft's slew only had 36 billion.

A comScore comparison for the previous three months might give an answer for the drops, as December saw 66 billion searches overall, January raised the bar at 71.9 billion and then February, two days shorter, reached 67.4 billion searches.