This week the Nielsen Company has released the U.S. search engine rankings for December and the trends don’t seem to suggest any immediate change in the market shares.

Google Search, as expected, maintained its strangle-hold on the internet search market with a 67.3% share of the total searches performed. This actually marks almost a 2% increase in their total share since the November results were published. As a result, their closest rivals Yahoo search and Bing each saw a small drop in their popularity loosing roughly 1% of the market each since last month.

Of the rest of the small time players in the top ten search engines for the U.S. (including AOL, Ask and My Web Search) not one saw any growth in December with the majority losing ground in at least a small way.

The most notable points here are that Google’s grip on the market is rapidly becoming a sleeper hold as they seem to gain more ground from their opposition month on month. Elsewhere it is becoming undeniable that Yahoo is losing ground and their loss last month is not just a blip when you consider their slow decline in the past couple of months.

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