Google’s U.S. search market share closes in on 70%

It looks as if Microsoft’s (MSFT) efforts to dethrone Google (GOOG) as the search engine king have failed. The Internet giant’s search market share hit record highs in the month of October, accounting for 66.9% of all searches conducted in the United States. Microsoft’s efforts may have been ineffective at toppling Google thus far, but the company’s advertising campaign has helped it steal market share from other search engines. According to comScore’s most recent numbers, Bing also had a record month with a 16% share of the market. The total number of searches conducted in October increased 8% to 17.6 billion, with Google accounting for 11.8 billion compared to Microsoft’s 2.8 billion. Rounding out the top five search engines were Yahoo (YHOO), Ask (IACI) and AOL (AOL) with 12.2%, 3.2% and 1.8% shares of the market, respectively. It is worth noting, however, that the research firm does not account for mobile searches.