Wafer Thin Mint? Mr. Google?

Coming as it does after news of Microsoft’s plan to bribe consumers to use its search engine, reports of Google’s (GOOG) continued dominance in search aren’t all that surprising. Google’s share of the U.S. search market in April grew to 61.6%, up from 59.8% in March, comScore announced today. And it grew at the expense of rivals Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT), AOL (TWX) and Ask.com (IACI). Yahoo’s share dropped 0.9 percentage points to 20.4%, Microsoft dropped 0.3 to 9.1%, AOL dropped 0.2 to 4.6% and Ask dropped 0.4 to 4.3%.

A pretty dismal showing for the other four “major” search engines, which apparently bleed and sweat search market share. As noted here last week, the IT industry used to say that IBM (IBM) wasn’t the competition; it was the environment in which you compete. Today the adage seems equally applicable to Google, which dominates the search market just as IBM once dominated the computer industry.