Google maintained its lead in the U.S. search market in November with 39.8 percent of all the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo at 29.5 percent and MSN at 14.2 percent, according to comScore Media Metrix monthly numbers released Friday. Year over year, Google's search share increased 5.2 percentage points, whereas Yahoo's declined 2.5 points, resulting in November's gap of more than 10.3 percentage points between the top two engines, compared with November 2004's 2.6 point difference (Google's 34.6 percent vs. Yahoo's 32.0 percent).

Taking fourth place in November was the Time Warner Network with an 8.7 percent share (down 0.4 percentage points year over year), followed by Ask Jeeves with 6.5 percent (up 1.0 percentage points).

U.S. users conducted 5.15 billion searches online in November 2005, up 9 percent from November 2004. Google accounted for a plurality of those searches, with 2.05 billion. Yahoo sites followed with 1.52 billion, MSN/Microsoft with 728.8 million, Time Warner Network with 446 million, and Ask Jeeves with 336.3 million.

With regard to toolbar searches - which constituted 12 percent of searches in November - Yahoo sites led with 48.5 percent, followed by Google's 46.4 percent share, according to comScore.