American searchers spent a lot of time in January hitting the search engines. ComScore said Americans made 6.9 billion searches for the month, with Google handling 3.3 billion of them. Those searches gave Google 47.5 percent of the market, and that was a little increase over their December share. After Google, the other major search engines fell into line behind them.

Yahoo held on to second place but lost some share, dropping to 28.1 percent, while Microsoft moved up a little to 10.6 percent. Ask.com saw its share drift down to 5.2 percent. Overall, people have been doing a lot more searching. January’s number of searches was up 26 percent over the same month in 2006.