By Miriam Gottfried
Google (GOOG) led the U.S. explicit core search market in March with 65.7% market share, according to data released by comScore.
The search giant’s market share represents a 0.3% gain over February.
Google’s performance was followed by Yahoo (YHOO) sites with 15.7% and Microsoft (MSFT) sites with 13.9%. Those numbers represent a 0.4% decline for Yahoo and a 0.3% increase for Microsoft.
Ask Network accounted for 3.1% of explicit core searches, followed by AOL (AOL) with 1.6 percent.
According to comScore, explicit core search “excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.”
More than 16.9 billion explicit core searches were conducted in March. Google ranked first with 11.1 billion searches, followed by Yahoo with 2.7 billion, Microsoft with 2.4 billion, Ask Network with 520 million and AOL with 272 million, comScore said.
Google, which reports earnings tomorrow, closed up 1% at $576.28.
