You know, Google had better stay on top of things. While they remain the king of the jungle at this point, it would not take much to dethrone them if something better comes along.

The number of searches on the Web in December surged by 55 percent, as Google Inc. siphoned market share from Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft MSN and accounted for nearly half of all searches, a research firm said Thursday.

The latest numbers from Nielsen/NetRatings reflected the growing importance of search among U.S. Web surfers, who conducted 5.1 billion searches in the last month of 2005, compared with 3.3 billion the same period a year ago. In the same timeframe, the number of people on the Internet in the U.S. rose only 3 percent to 207 million. [Read the rest]

[tags]web search market,web surfers,siphoned market share[/tags]