Google is Throttling its Search Competitors

ComScore released its monthly qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace on Thursday. According to the compiled data, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) sites led the explicit core search market in March, accounting for 66.4 percent of search queries conducted.

Google was followed by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) sites with a 15.3 percent share, and Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) sites with 13.7 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL (NYSE:AOL) with 1.6 percent.

In March, 18.4 billion explicit core searches were conducted. The results indicated that Google sites ranked first with 12.2 billion (up 4 percent), while Microsoft sites again ranked second with 2.8 billion (up 5 percent). The top contenders were followed by Yahoo with 2.5 billion (up 4 percent), Ask Network with 555 million (up 4 percent) and AOL with 285 million (up 7 percent).

ComScore also revealed 68.6 percent of searches in March carried organic search results from Google, while 25.9 percent of searches were powered by Bing (versus 26.2 percent in February).