Google Keeps Growing While Facebook, Bing Plot

Google improved its already dominant  Internet search market share in September, capturing 66% of all searches, according to research unveiled just as Microsoft announced its new partnership between Facebook and its Bing search engine. Google searches accounted for 65.4% of all U.S.-based searching in August 2010, and rose to 66.1% in September 2010, according to the research firm comScore.

Google seems to have increased its share at the expense of Yahoo. While Google's share increased 0.7%, Yahoo's share decreased an identical 0.7%, from 17.4% to 16.7%.

Microsoft was in third place with 11.2% of searches, up from 11.1% in August.

Out of 16 billion "explicit core searches" – defined as "user engagement with a search service with the intent to retrieve search results" – 10.6 billion were conducted through Google.

Ask and AOL combined for about 6% of the search market.

In early September Google unveiled Instant Search, which lets users see results even before they finish typing a word. ComScore said it had to alter its measurement technique in order to account for the change, and prevent Google from artificially improving its market share.

"The page is dynamically updated as the user continues typing, which could potentially generate a large number of result pages that may or may not be of user interest," ComScore said. "Fortunately, the comScore panel provides visibility into all events that a user is conducting and all the HTTP calls associated with the user's actions."