Google continued its dominance in the search engine rankings with the comScore search report of the month pointing to a 58.5% share of all the online searches in US. MSN Live also witnessed double digit growth rate. But the share of Yahoo did not show any stark improvement and continues as a distant third to Google at 22.2%.

An excerpt from the search engine rankings report at comScore:

Americans conducted 10.5 billion searches at the core search engines, representing an 8.9 percent gain versus December. Google Sites saw 6.1 billion core searches during the month, while Yahoo! Sites recorded 2.3 billion. Each of the five core search engines saw the number of searches conducted in January grow at least 5 percent versus the previous month.

The data from these search related metrics could be relevant to the titanic acquisition bids taking place in the technology world. A Microsoft-Yahoo combined entity would represent larger market share but it is questionable whether clubbing two distant search engines will significantly boost search rankings.