New York (NY) - Google and Yahoo accelerate the pace in the increasingly competitive search market and were able add market shares in May. Google commands a comfortable lead and answers more searches than the Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask combined, according to a report released by Nielsen Netratings.

The quickly growing popularity of Internet searches did not slow down in May, growing at a sequential rate of 7.5% over April to a total of 5.67 billion searches. Google and Yahoo continue to be the main beneficiaries of this trend: Google was consulted for 2.78 billion or 49.1% of all searches, while Yahoo attracted 1.30 billion searches for a market share 22.9%.

Google and Yahoo were able to post year-over-year gains of 32% and 34%, respectively. Market share gains over April were 0.6 and 0.4 percentage points, respectively. Microsoft's MSN search outgrew Google and Yahoo in terms of percentage (42% to 601 million searches), but the increase was not large enough to maintain its market share - which feel from 10.7% in April to 10.6% in May.

AOL Search, ranked fourth, also had to give up market share: The company dropped from 6.6% to 6.4%. Ask.com completes the top-5: The service posted a 69% year-over-year gain in searches (146 million), which translates into a 2.6% share.

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