Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in July with 63 percent of the searches conducted, up from 61.9 percent in July, followed by Yahoo! Sites (19.6 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.3 percent), Ask Network (4.8 percent), and AOL LLC (4.3 percent), a report said on Thursday. In the comScore August 2008 analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led with 10.2 billion searches, a 2-percent increase versus July. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 2.4 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites with 1 billion and AOL LLC with 839 million.

ComScore estimates that the number of searches performed by U.S. Web surfers on the five top search engines was virtually unchanged at 11.75 billion searches compared with July. The figure excludes searches users perform for mapping, local directory information or user-generated videos, it said.