Google handled 6.8 billion U.S. search queries in August

While Yahoo handles about a third of Google's volume to US Web users, its traffic loss for the month was not dramatic - only 50 million queries. Between July and August, MSN sites lost about 110 million queries.

But what may be curious is how comScore continues to count queries - essentially any kind of search across any of a company's properties. YouTube now counts, so the act of searching for a video is considered a query, and that plays right into Google's numbers. When you look at the breakdown, YouTube's 1.2 million queries now account for 18% of Google's US search numbers. Yahoo doesn't have a colossal video site; while Yahoo Video does exist, its search traffic appears to have been lumped into the 1.4% of Yahoo search traffic that comScore counts as "Other."

Take YouTube out of the picture, and the gap between Google and Yahoo narrows by almost 28%. By comparison, US "queries" on MySpace are actually down by 15 million for the month, to 560 million.