Americans conduct 10.8 billion web searches in March, a nine per cent increase compared with February, new monitoring data reveals.

The latest comScore qSearch report found that Google Sites extended its share of core searches in March to 59.8 per cent, up from 59.2 per cent in February.

Yahoo Sites ranked second with 21.3 per cent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.4 per cent), AOL LLC (4.8 per cent) and Ask Network (4.7 per cent).

Each of the five core search engines experienced search query gains during the month. Google Sites saw more than 6.4 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo Sites with 2.3 billion and Microsoft Sites with one billion.

In the March 2008 analysis of the Top 50 properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led with 8.3 billion searches.

Yahoo Sites ranked second with 2.4 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (more than 1 billion) and AOL LLC (891 million).