Americans conducted 15.2 core searches in January 2010

comScore has just announced its monthly qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In January 2010, Americans conducted 15.2 billion core searches.

Google Sites accounted for 9.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (375 million).

Yes, yes, we all knew that Google accounted for 65.4 percent search market share. But Microsoft has grabbed 11.3 percent market share.

But, if you scroll down the press release, you'll see that there were 3.7 billion "extended searches" conducted on YouTube. What's an extended search? It's a search that takes place on a site other than the five search engines mentioned above.

So, if we didn't have two categories, then YouTube would be the second largest search engine, behind only Google.

Get it? Got it? Good.

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