Bing No. 2 Search Engine in December 2012 in the U.S. Search Marketplace

Google led the explicit core search market in December 2012 with 65.9 percent of search queries conducted (up 0.5 percentage points), followed by Microsoft's Bing with 15.1 percent (up 0.1 percentage points), according to a report of comScore's qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace.

comScore reports Yahoo! came third with 14.5 percent market share, and Ask accounted 2.9 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL with 1.6 percent.

In Dec 2012, more than 18.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted (up 2 percent). Google ranked first with 12 billion (up 3 percent), followed by Bing with 2.7 billion (up 2 percent) and Yahoo! Search at number 3 with 2.6 billion.

Ask Network delivered 531 million searches (up 3 percent), while AOL rounded out the top five with 287 million.

According to comScore report, Google also lead the total core searches in the U.S., and accounted 66.1 percent of total core search queries conducted (up 0.4 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! with 16.2 percent.

Bing at number 3 position recored 13.8 percent.

In Dec. Americans conducted 20.5 billion total core search queries (up 3 percent). Google ranking first recorded 13.6 billion searches (up 4 percent), followed by Yahoo!'s 3.3 billion (up 2 percent).

Bing accounted 2.8 billion (up 2 percent).