The web search engine is as essential as a telephone or a car these days; you just can't get by without using one. You have a few choices, though. Do you use Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft? Feel free to tell us your choice if you want, but we've got hard data on what a whole lot of people use! A research group called comScore recorded information on which search engines people in the United States used in November, and published the results.

It shouldn't be a surprise that Google came out on top. Out of the 12.3 billion core searches, 63.5% — or about 7.8 billion — were done with Google. The runner up was Yahoo! with 20.4%, followed by Microsoft at 8.5%. What you might find surprising, though, is that Google-owned YouTube was used about 2.6 billion time, or more than the entire Yahoo! network combined. The focus of the internet used to be on words and (to some extent) images, but video is getting bigger and bigger.

Company rivalries aside, 12.3 billion searches is impressive. That's more than one search a day for every person living in the United States.

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