The Nielsen Company released its U.S. search rankings for December 2009 earlier today. Of the big three — Google, Yahoo and Bing — Google saw an increase in search share, while both Yahoo and Bing faltered.

Comparing December’s data with some of the measurements from past months seems to indicate that Bing’s marketshare surge was just temporary.

Below we’ve included Nielsen’s data from December 2009 and November 2009. As you can see, Google held a 67.3 percent share in U.S. searches for December 2009. That’s up nearly two full percentage points when compared with the November statistics.

Looking at the charts, it’s clear that this growth came directly at the expense of Yahoo and Bing. Both search engines fell nearly a full point from November to December. Google’s high-profile rollout of real-time search results the first week of December might have had an impact.

Now that Yahoo and Microsoft are officially teaming up for search, both companies will need to start working together quickly if they want to recover and build marketshare. The longer the transition takes, the more Google stands to gain.

Tags: bing, Google, search market share, Yahoo

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