Americans conducted 14.8 billion core searches last month, a 3% gain over March, according to April, 2009 data from comScore, Inc.'s qSearch service, which indicate that a large majority of searches continue to be initiated on Google.

Google Still Leads Core Search

Google Sites led the US core search market for the month with 9.5 billion (64.2%) searches conducted, writes MarketingCharts. It was followed by Yahoo! Sites with 3 billion searches (20.4%), and Microsoft Sites with 1.2 billion searches (8.2%), comScore said.

Ask Network (3.8% of core searches) and AOL LLC (3.4%) hold the #4 and #5 rankings.Google, whose search share grew half a percentage point vs. March 2009, is the only core search engine to experience month-over-month share growth. However, four of the five search engines experienced increases in the number of searches conducted:

Top Search Properties

The April 2009 analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed revealed Google Sites led with 13 billion searches, up 5% vs. March. Yahoo ranks second with 3.2 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (1.3 billion) and AOL LLC (795 million).

The number of month-over-month searches increased most dramatically on eBay (up 20%), while they decreased the most on Facebook.com (down 28%).Nielsen Online, which recently reported its own April search-share numbers, also puts Google at around a 64% share, while Hitwise, which employs a different methodology and different time frames, said Google is closing in on a 73% share of the US search market.

About the rankings: comScore's core search rankings are based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.