Google still dominates the search engine market, moving further ahead during December, according to new figures out this week.

ComScore Networks' monthly analysis of activity across competitive search engines found that Google sites captured 47.4 per cent of the US search market in December, gaining 0.4 percentage points over the previous month.

Yahoo was the only other search firm to experience positive growth over the month, jumping 0.3 percentage points and maintaining its second place ranking with 28.5 per cent of US searches.

MSN-Microsoft took 10.5 per cent, Ask took 5.4 per cent and Time Warner took 4.9 per cent.

Americans conducted 6.7 billion searches in December, up one per cent compared with November.

Google recorded 3.2 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo with 1.9 billion, MSN-Microsoft with 713 million, Ask with 363 million, and Time Warner with 335 million.