Americans conducted nearly 10 billion core searches in February - a 6 percent decline from January, primarily because Feb. is a shorter month - according to the monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the search marketplace, MarketingCharts writes.

Core Search Rankings

Share of Searches

• In February, Google Sites increased share of core searches to 59.2 percent from 58.5 percent the previous month.
• Yahoo Sites ranked second with 21.6 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.6 percent), AOL LLC (4.9 percent), and Ask Network (4.6 percent).

(For related graph, see "Online Search Share, January & February 2008.")

Number of Search Queries

• Americans conducted 9.9 billion searches at the core search engines - a 6 percent decline from January. The number of searches declined at each of the core search engines.
• Google Sites recorded more than 5.8 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo Sites with 2.1 billion, and Microsoft Sites with 953 million.

Expanded Search Rankings

• The February 2008 analysis of the Top 50 properties worldwide where search activity is observed found that Google Sites led with 7.4 billion searches:

• Yahoo Sites ranked second with 2.3 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (984 million), and AOL LLC (864 million).