comScore Networks has just released (a few minutes ago) their monthly qSearch analysis of activity across all of the major competitive search engines.

In January 2007, Google Sites captured 47.5 percent of the entire United States search market, and Google gained 0.2 share points from the previous month. In contrast, Yahoo! Sites maintained its second place ranking with 28.1 percent of all United States-based web searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.6 percent). Ask Network (5.2 percent) and Time Warner Network (5.0 percent) rounded out the top five.

The following is a table that lists the comScore data:

Share of Online Searches by Engine
December 2006 – January 2007
Total U.S. Home, Work and University Internet Users
Source: comScore qSearch

Americans conducted 6.9 billion searches online in January, up 2 percent versus December. Annual growth rates in search query volume remained strong with a 26-percent increase since the same month a year ago.

Google Sites led the pack with 3.3 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.9 billion), MSN-Microsoft (733 million), Ask Network (361 million), and Time Warner Network (342 million).