Every month about this time comScore releases the search engine rankings data, and I report it here. These are not the actual search engine rankings that you see when you search at a search engine, which are constantly changing. Think of this more as the “market share” for the search engine industry.

I posted February 2012 search engine rankings, as well, if you would like to compare February 2012 with March 2012.

During March 2012, according to comScore, “Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in March with 66.4 percent market share, followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.3 percent and Yahoo! Sites with 13.7 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent.”

18.4 billion explicit core searches were conducted in March, with Google Sites ranking first with 12.2 billion (up 4 percent). Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.8 billion searches (up 5 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.5 billion (up 4 percent), Ask Network with 555 million (up 4 percent) and AOL, Inc. with 285 million (up 7 percent).