Google inches up And Yahoo inches down

It was business as usual for the U.S. search engine market in February.

Google gained a fraction of a point, bumping its share to 66.4 percent, while Yahoo lost a bit more ground, leaving it with 13.8 percent of the market. Microsoft's Bing eked out a slight gain to grab 15.3 percent of the market & retain its grip on the No. two spot.

Yahoo has steadily been losing market share over the past couple of years, finally relinquishing second place to Bing in December. Taking a look at the hard numbers, Google captured 11.7 billion core searches in February, followed by Bing with two.7 billion & Yahoo with two.4 billion.

As always, ComScore's figures include only explicit core searches that people by hand enter on a Web page.

Yahoo & Bing stay separate search portals, but both are powered by the same underlying engine. Bing's share of "powered by" searches, which include those at Yahoo, totaled 26.2 percent last month, a slight dip from 26.5 percent in January.

Google's "powered by" searches, which cover results at AOL & Ask, grabbed a 68.6 percent share in February, a minor gain from 68.4 percent the prior month.