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It's been a brutal search market except for a few. Four of the top ten search engines had significant drops in the number of searches, and MSN gets the title of biggest loser.

Google's year-over-year growth, according to Nielsen//Netratings search share rankings report for September, was 24 percent. With 2.8 billion searches conducted there, Nielsen estimates that Google controlled a flat 50 percent of all US searches.

Yahoo! grew by 12 percent over last year, providing the portal for 1.3 billion searches, 23.4 percent.

In third place, though, there is a noticeable 12 percent decline for MSN/Windows Live Search, collecting just 9.2 percent of searches, or 519 million. According to some estimates, MSN once attracted as high as 18 percent, but usually weighed in at around 12 percent of searches.

MSN even out-lost troubled AOL, post-The Call and post-Data Valdez. AOL's year-over-year growth declined by 8.7 percent, garnering 358 million searches, or 6.3 percent of them.

Ask.com and My Way Search both posted positive growth of 19 and 16 percent, respectively, collecting 2.7 and 2.2 percent shares of the search market. After that, it's a sad story all around.

Earthlink is down 2 percent, iWon Search is down 26 percent, and Dogpile is down 34 percent. Together, those last three make up only 1.5 percent of US searches conducted.

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