The search landscape is still evolving even if at its usual slow pace. Not too much has changed in October, Google still clearly dominates and has actually picked up a little market share in the last month, but the other two players are bit more dynamic. Yahoo took quite a significant dive, dropping almost 1 percent point, while Microsoft's Bing continues its upwards crawl gaining a bit more market share.

ComScore released the October numbers for the US “core search” market which takes into account just the five biggest search engines, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and AOL. The big winner last month, if you can call it that at 9.9 percent market share, was Bing, which proves to be a real success for Microsoft, taking into account the low expectations with which it launched. Microsoft's search engine got just 8 percent of the searches the month before Bing launched and 9.4 percent in September.

An almost 2 percent rise in market share in five months doesn't look that impressive, but Microsoft has been trying to make inroads into the search market for years to little success until now. There's just one downside to the numbers, Bing gained market share at the expense of Yahoo, while Google continues to look unfazed. Yahoo actually saw quite a big drop losing 0.8 percent points in just one month accelerating the downwards trend it saw all year. Yahoo got just 18 percent of the search market in October compared to 18.8 percent in September.

Yahoo and Bing combined are at around 29 percent, the same number they've enjoyed for months now. It remains to be seen if the upcoming merger of the two search engines manages to change that. In the mean time, Google went from 64.9 percent of the searches in September to 65.4 last month and is on an upwards trend for the year, starting out at 63 percent in January 2009. Perpetual runners-up, Ask.com and AOL, complete the lineup with 3.9 percent and 2.9 percent, respectively, basically the same numbers as in the previous month.