Nielsen/NetRatings on Tuesday issued its monthly data for the top U.S. search providers, ranked by total number of online search queries. Ask.com was the only engine to outpace Google in year-over-year growth in the number of searches conducted.

Google, nevertheless, had an impressive growth of 31 percent from Nov. '05, accounting for 49.5 percent of searches this November with an estimated  3.1 billion queries. Ask's year-over-year growth of 33 percent was from a much smaller base; in fifth place, it accounted for only 2.6 percent of searches in November with 160 million.

Yahoo was second with 1.5 billion searches, less than half of Google's, and a 24.3 percent search share. In third place was MSN/Windows Live Search, with negative year-over-year growth (-12 percent) and 8.2 percent market share, followed by AOL in fourth with 6.2 percent share.