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Yahoo also made a slight gain in its share of the search market, while search on AOL plunged four percent in July 2006 from the same period last year.

Google's run of eleven months of search engine share gains came to a screeching halt in July, as comScore reported on its July 2006 US search engine rankings.

Google's total share of US searches declined a full percentage point from June to July, leaving it with 43.7 percent of the market. That is still a boost over July 2005, where Google's 36.5 percent had it only six percentage points over Yahoo at that time.

Yahoo increased slightly from June to July, moving from 28.5 to 28.8 percent of search. MSN/Microsoft remained the same, with 12.8 percent of shares unchanged from June. AOL's search fell four percent year-over-year, with the company attracting 5.9 percent of US searches in July; that represented a 0.3 percent increase from June, though.

Ask.com proved the biggest beneficiary of Google's giveaway. Its share of search nudged upward by 0.4 percent to 5.4 percent of the US search market in July.

ComScore said the 6.3 billion searches performed in July represented the usual seasonal decline seen in the month. But growth in search query volume has jumped by 30 percent since July 2005. The company listed the volume for each of the trio in its report:

Google Sites led the pack with 2.7 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.8 billion), MSN-Microsoft (802 million), Time-Warner Network (366 million), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (338 million).
When it comes to toolbars, no one is handier than Google and Yahoo. Together, the duo dominated searches performed from toolbars. ComScore said Google grabbed 50.3 percent of toolbar searches, while Yahoo! captured 46.2 percent.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.