October saw business as usual in the U.S. search engine market with Google and Bing both grabbing slightly more share and Yahoo losing a bit, according to data out yesterday from ComScore.

Google kept its top perch with a 66.3 percent chunk of all searches, a gain of 0.2 of a percentage point from September. In third place, Microsoft's Bing captured an 11.5 percent share of the market, up 0.3 of a percentage point. And Yahoo saw its share at 15.6 percent, down 0.2 of a percentage point from the prior month. These figures cover explicit core searches only, meaning searches manually entered on a Web page.

Eyeing the actual numbers, the U.S. search market saw 16.6 billion core searches overall in October. Google captured 11 billion of those, a 4 percent gain from the prior month. Yahoo accounted for 2.7 billion, up 2 percent from September, while Microsoft took in 1.9 billion, a gain of 7 percent from the month before.

October was the second month that ComScore also tracked "powered by" searches, meaning organic searches powered by the likes of Google and Bing for other Web sites.

Google's "powered by" share covers its own properties as well as those at AOL and Ask's MyWebSearch, while Bing's share includes its own sites along with Yahoo's Web, image, and video searches. For the month, Google grabbed 69.2 percent of all organic search results in the U.S., while Bing took home 23.5 percent.