In a recent survey by Comscore, Google was still on top in terms of overal share of the US search market.  The search Goliath has a 47.4% share, up 0.4% during December.  Yahoo also increased by 0.3% up to 28.5%.

MSN and Ask did not fare so well. MSN slid 0.5% to a 10.5% share, and Ask dipped by 0.1% to a total of 5.4%.

Search engine use was also up significantly over the last two years.  Consumers conducted over 3 billion searches on Google related websites, and almost 2 million on Yahoo. A total of 6.7 billion searches were conducted in the US in December, or almost 84 billion searches a year.

These figures are not exactly surprising. Most of your traffic will come from keyword searches, and you have to be on the first page of Google and Yahoo. The question is, what is the most cost effective way of getting in front of this huge audience? As many etailers are finding out, the answer is through blogs and blog marketing.