Nielsen/NetRatings confirms the consensus… with its release of search-volume data for June showing extraordinary gains by Microsoft's MSN/Windows Live Search - both in year-over-year growth and increase in search share from May to June - reports MarketingCharts.

The MegaView Search data released late last week agrees, in general, with the June search results issued by comScore and Compete - at least in the case of MSN/Windows Live Search.

Though Google and Yahoo retained their top spots in June, with 52.7 percent and 20.2 percent of searches, respectively, Microsoft's increased nearly four percentage points, to 13.3 percent in June from 8.4 percent in May, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

Moreover, MSN/Live Search accounted for nearly 1 billion searches in June - an increase of 77 percent from June 2006, according to the data - while Google's growth year over year was 46 percent, and Yahoo's 20 percent.

Nevertheless, Google lost 3.6 percentage points, and Yahoo 1.3 percentage points, from May to June, according to the NetRatings data. (See side-by-side chart of May and June search shares.)

MarketingCharts offers some more tidbits of data here.