I don't think anyone expects major revelations anymore when comScore releases its search engine market share reports, and as such it wasn't much of a surprise that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) continues to dominate in a big way, but what is surprising perhaps was that while Yahoo! lost 0.6 points of explicit core search market share, it was Google that scored the vast majority of it.

That's right, even though Bing and Yahoo! are essentially a single entity for counting purposes since Bing is running Yahoo! search now, Google gained 0.5 points in December while Bing only benefited from just 0.1 points. Ouch.

If you look at explicit core search queries instead, that's a number that fluctuates and in December (not surprisingly during the holiday shopping season), it went up 2 percent. Who benefited the most? Well, Google beat Microsoft in this case, getting 3 percent of the total with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) sites (mostly Bing) getting 2 percent. Yahoo! was down 2 percent, Ask was up 3 percent and AOL unchanged.

There are additional ways that comScore looks at these numbers and if you click through to the announcement, you'll see that Google was up on all counts. 

Google has received some heat as of late due to adding a Google+ results toggle to the Google search results. Some pundits don't feel this a fair approach. I'm not so sure, but I'm wondering if the controversy will end up hurting Google in the next round of results or not. It should be interesting to see if that happens.

For more information:
- see the comScore press release

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