Internet marketing research company ComScore revealed the latest numbers in the Web search market.

There were no big surprises in January as the top three remained unchanged. Google still masters the market with 63% of all search traffic, but its market share decreased 0.5 percent, the exact amount with which Yahoo increased its market share to 21 percent.

The good news for Yahoo came at the appropriate time. The company celebrates five years since it started running its search engine independently.

The third place still belongs to Microsoft, which had 8.5 percent of the Web search market. AOL had 3.9 percent of the market to step up on the fourth place and leave Ask Network on the fifth place with 3.7 percent.

The number of searches conducted by U.S. residents also grew 7 percent to 13.5 billion. However the 7% increase compared to December is quite understandable considering the fact that most of us were more occupied with the holydays than with Web searching.

In absolute numbers, Google recorded about 8.5 billion searches, Yahoo had 2.8 billion, Microsoft had 1.1 billion and AOL and Ask had about 500 million each.

All the top Web search sites recorded growth. Yahoo and AOL grew the most - 9%, Microsoft had 8% more searches, Ask had just 2% growth and gave away the fourth spot to AOL.