A few days ago Nielsen//NetRatings released their search engine usage rankings for the month of December 2006.  I know I checked this Friday before I left for the weekend… so I think they snuck it up over the weekend!  Haha.

Not surprisingly, Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Windows Live represent the top three search engines.  Yahoo's year-to-year growth of 30.1% was the highest of the top three, beating out Google's 22.6%.  Of the 10 search providers on the report, only MSN/Windows Live showed a decline year-to-year (-9.7%) .

The growth leader of the pack for December was NexTag Search.  Even though it only captured 0.4% of the search in December, that represented 123.2% growth.  Keeping in the mind that NexTag is comparison shopping and product search, it's not surprising that it would suddenly jump up into the top 10 during the busy shopping holiday.

To compare monthly usage during the past 6 months, visit the Internet Marketing Monitor's Search Engine Report Card.  You can also view the Nielsen//NetRatings report in PDF format.