New figures published by US research agency, comScore, show that Google holds greater loyalty amongst its users compared to Yahoo! and Microsoft. As reported by Reuters, this new data illustrates that Google not only has a very strong market share, but also retains searchers for longer with more searches conducted each month.

The research also shows that Yahoo! and Microsoft have a combined search penetration of 73% in the US, which isn't too far behind Google's level of 84%. However, Google searchers conduct an average of 54.5 searches a month, which is about double the number of searches recorded by users of Yahoo! and Microsoft combined - these users search on average 26.9 times a month, according to the comScore report.

In terms of loyalty, the research found that Google searchers make nearly 70% of their searches on Google sites whereas people who use Yahoo! and Microsoft sites combined search there about 33% of the time and also use Google heavily. This gives the newly combined force of Yahoo! and Microsoft a challenging target to reach, which is likely to an even wider gap in Australia and other countries where Google dominates even more than in the US.