The search market is huge and generates vast amounts of money for the players who are able to successfully compete. That competition is growing but the vast majority of users online use Google for their search activities. Google has competition from the much less popular Yahoo and Bing search engines to some extent, but even combined Bing and Yahoo only have a fraction of the search traffic that Google boasts.

Nielsen Wire reports that the latest figures for the search market for August 2010 are now in. Predictably, Google still holds the lion's share with 65.1% of the entire market, growing 1% compared to the previous month. While Google still dominates, that leaves the smaller players to fight for the remaining spots on the list.

Traditionally Yahoo has held the second place spot with Microsoft Bing in third spot. There were changes for the first time in August for that second spot ranking. Bing was finally able to overtake Yahoo to get the second spot on the list. Bing/MSN/Windows Live searches held 13.9% of the search market for the month, growing 2% from the previous month. Yahoo slipped 8% for August compared to the previous month to close with 13.5% of the search market.

The fourth place spot on the search list goes to Ask.com with a scant 2.1% of search and AOL with 2% of the market. With Bing now powering Yahoo, the total combined Microsoft share of the search market is about 26%.

Nielsen points out that its rankings only reflect search queries generated by a use so contextual searches or other non-user generated searches are not factored into the numbers.

Bing started to slowly capture some of Yahoo's market share in March.