Yahoo up, Ask and Fox down in latest search rankings

ComScore's January 2009 numbers are out, and the most popular search site in America is...oh, that one you can easily guess. The less obvious numbers involve who's gaining ground, and which mega-funded search entity seems to be slipping.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Google leads the pack in market share, accounting for 63% of all search traffic from home, work and university locations in January. Interestingly, that's down one-half of one percent -- precisely the amount by which second-ranked Yahoo is up for the month, at 21%.

Americans conducted 13.5 billion searches at five biggest search sites, according to Comscore -- 7% more than they did in December (when many of us were otherwise occupied with the holidays). That works out to 8.5 billion searches for Google, 2.8 billion for Yahoo, 1.1 billion for third-place Microsoft, and in the neighborhood of 500 million for AOL and Ask.

All five of the top sites grew in absolute numbers during the period, with Yahoo and AOL showing 9% growth and Microsoft hot on their heels with 8%. Ask, meanwhile, grew about 2%, but slipped from fourth place in market share to fifth, swapping spots with AOL.

ComScore releases an expanded set of stats for not only better insight into the big five, but a glimpse of what's bubbling beneath the top tier. There's some chewy data in there. For instance, if you need a snapshot of the state of the battle between Facebook and MySpace, know that MySpace had nearly three times as many searches during January as Facebook (550 million versus 195 million), but Facebook grew 21% compared to MySpace's modest 7%. On the other hand, if you've got stock in News Corp., MySpace is the only good news you're getting where search is concerned; Fox Interactive Media's other searches were down a collective 20%.

At the big site-specific searches, one gets (perhaps) a glimpse of the economy in action. Amazon's search numbers were down about 4% in January, possibly reflecting the end of the holidays; eBay's were up 8%, perhaps reflecting the impossibility of exchanging one's gifts elsewhere; and Craigslist's numbers were up a dazzling 28%. That number represents 497 million searches undertaken, more than were done at AOL Search Network, MapQuest, Ask.com, or MyWebSearch.com.