Nielsen Online released its estimation of the Top 10 US Search Providers in April 2008. Nielsen Online bases its numbers on the total number of search queries conducted at each search provider.

Looking beyond the dominance of Google over Yahoo! and Microsoft’s struggle to break the 10% market-share mark, the Nielsen list shows an interesting micro-glimpse of the search engine landscape and search-user habits.

Here’s Nielsen Online’s view of the Top10 with a few short notes (of my own) for each.
1/ Google Search - Google.com

• 5,109,444,000 search queries served
• 35.4% growth over April 2007
• 62.0% share of searches

2/ Yahoo! Search – Yahoo.com

• 1,446,410,000 search queries served
• -3.4% growth over April 2007
• 17.5% share of searches

3/ MSN/Windows Live Search - MSN.com and Live.com are two unique search addresses both delivering results from Live Search.

• 796,038,000 search queries served
• 30.0% growth over April 2007
• 9.7% share of searches

4/ AOL Search - AOL Search delivers organic results from Google’s index.

• 352,039,000 search queries served
• -5.1% growth over April 2007
• 4.3% share of searches

5/  Ask.com Search - Ask.com

• 171,545,000 search queries served
• 35.8% growth over April 2007
• 2.1% share of searches

6/ MyWeb Search – Child friendly, “…fully featured stand alone filtered Internet browser.” Not sure where they draw results from.

• 57,057,000 search queries served
• -16.0% growth over April 2007
• 0.7% share of searches

7/ Comcast Search – ISP and Telecommunications company

• 46,156,000 search queries served
• 31.0% growth over April 2007
• 0.6% share of searches

8/ AT&T Worldnet Search – fed by Google, Worldnet is AT&T’s information portal

• 28,059,000 search queries served
• 200.9% growth over April 2007
• 0.3% share of searches

9/ NexTag Search – Comparison Shopping search engine

• 21,996,000 search queries served
• 25.4% growth over April 2007
• 0.3% share of searches

10/ MyWay Search – Search/Info/personalized portal run by IAC. Organic search defaults to Ask.com but doesn’t draw results. Gives option to search for Google or Yahoo! results. Tag line reads: “no banners, no pop-ups, no kidding”. Lots of Google and IAC sponsored or paid-ads though.

• 16,742,000 search queries served
• -37.6% growth over April 2007
• 0.2% share of searches