Nobody has ever doubted that Google is the most popular search engine on the Internet and the statistics released every month simply confirm this statement. Nielsen Online released the Top US Search Providers ranking for April 2008 revealing, once again, that Google is the king of the web when it comes to search engines. According to information provided by Nielsen, Google Search recorded more than 5.1 billion searches in April 2008, which means that the Mountain View-based company attracted approximately 62 percent of the total number of Internet searches.

The rest of the top is quite irrelevant as the second place is accounted by Yahoo Search, the engine belonging to the Sunnyvale-based company which attracted 17.5 percent of the total number of searches. No less than 1.45 billion searches were conducted on the Yahoo product, Nielsen Online revealed in the report.

Microsoft and its MSN/Windows Live Search won the third position with quite a low number of searches compared to Google's, as nearly 800 million searches were conducted on the engine owned by the Redmond-based software giant. This means that no less than 9.7 percent of the total searches have been conducted through Microsoft's engine.

There's no surprise that Google is, once again, the leader of the search engine category and as you can see, the difference between the first two places is quite huge, showing that Google will remain the king of search for a long period from now on. However, it's interesting to see that more services struggle to step into the battle and compete with the giants. For instance, NexTag Search, a pretty anonymous engine, recorded approximately 22 million searches, which represents a 0.3 percentage of the total searches. Sure, it's an extremely low percentage, but it's nice to see that some people look for alternatives to the main search engines.