New research from OneStat.com shows that Google is still the largest internet search engine in terms of usage, but MSN Search begins gain share, even if slightly.

In the past eight months, Google’s market share has slipped slightly from 57.2% to 56.9% of total global usage. During that same time, MSN Search usage increased from 8.6% to 8.9%, with Yahoo keeping a steady 21.2% and AOL Search 3.2% of global usage.

One interesting point is that, according to this research, all other search engines only account for 9.8% of global internet searches. That may hold for North America and Western Europe, but it seems a little low when considering the rest of the world. It would also be interesting to see someone look into the market share of different search engines/portals/directories for helping people locate information. “Search” is likely the largest part of this, but solid information on the total market for directing users to information online is difficult to come by (any ideas/information would be appreciated; please comment below or drop us a note).

OneStat.com averaged search usage of 2 million visitors, which was comprised of 20,000 visitors from each of 100 countries, per day over the past 2 months to avoid any sudden shifts.

search engine optimisation is a process of improving traffic to a website through the search engines