SAN FRANCISCO
(Reuters) - Google Inc extended an already wide lead in the U.S. Web
search to 63.0 percent share of the market in August, its biggest
monthly gain in five months, a report said on Thursday.
Yahoo Inc, the No. 2 player in the U.S. Web search market saw its
share of the business drop 0.9 percent to 19.6 from July while
Microsoft, the No. 3 U.S. player, slipped 0.6 percent to 8.3 percent,
according to comScore Inc.
IAC InterActiveCorp's Ask.com grew 0.3 percent to retain its
fourth-place ranking while Time Warner Inc's AOL edged up 0.1 percent
to 4.3 percent, according to August monthly data published by the
market research firm said.
Google's growing share of Web search and, by extension, its even
larger role in the related market for Web search advertising, has lead
rivals and some industry trade groups to complain to competition
regulators in the United and Europe.
ComScore estimates that the number of searches performed by U.S. Web
surfers on the five top search engines was virtually unchanged at 11.75
billion searches compared with July. The figure excludes searches users
perform for mapping, local directory information or user-generated
videos, it said.
(Reporting by Eric Auchard, editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
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