comScore released its U.S. search engine market share numbers for October and to nobody's surprise, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) continues to dominate.

I thought it might be interesting, however to compare the numbers in this report with the ones from a year ago, and I found that while Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has made some modest gains, it is taking a majority of these gains from its partner, Yahoo! and the search engine also-rans, Ask and AOL.

For simplicity's sake, we are going to compare, the explicit core market share scores for October 2010 and 2011. If you want to see the full reports, click through to the press releases below. Check out the table below to see the changes from last year to this year. 

When you add up the gains for Microsoft, it got 1.3 from its own partner--so that's just essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul. Another 1.3 came from Ask and AOL and the remaning 0.7 came from Google, the company it's hoping to make gains on. In actuality, however, it only made a modest gain on Google. 

It's interesting to note, however, that searchers who weren't regular Google searchers seemed to move to Bing, rather than Google when they switched search engines.

All of this proves, however, that in spite of the massive investment Microsoft has made in Bing, it's still not getting a heck of a lot of bang for its buck and is making little headway on Google.

For more information:
- see the comScore October 2010 press release 
- see the comScore October 2011 press release

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