In comScore's latest search engine market share report for the period ending July 12, the total search engine market share remained surprisingly flat, especially given an increase in the overall number of searches from the previous month.

What was unexpected, however, was that Ask.com, not Google or Bing, garnered the largest gain in overall searches. What's even more interesting though is that in spite of that gain, Ask's overall market share only shifted by .1 percent.

If you're a regular reader, you know we cover search engine market share numbers regularly and it turns out to be a rather mundane exercise because Google always dominates, and everyone else battles for the rest. This report was no different, as Google remained the unparalleled search leader with 66.8 percent of the market share, unchanged from the June report.

Microsoft gained a sliver of market share, moving from 15.6 percent in June, to 15.7 percent in July. Yahoo! held steady at 13 percent and Ask gained .1 percent to move to 3.1 percent. AOL brought up the rear, unchanged at 1.5 percent.

Meanwhile, the total number of shares increased over June by 3 percent. Of that, Ask got a whopping 6 percent increase in total number of searches (still well behind the top players), while Bing gained 4 percent. Google and Yahoo! each gained 3 percent in overall number of searches. Only AOL saw no gain in additional searches.

It's always hard to draw any firm conclusions from one month's data. One thing that remains clear is Google's overall search market dominance. One glimmer of hope for Microsoft, perhaps, was that it was able to garner one percentage point more than Google from the overall number of searches, but for the most part, the picture remains a familiar one.

In spite of the fact that Google continues to clutter its search results with more and more result types, and in spite of some complaints about the quality of Google's results, it hasn't had any impact on overall search market share numbers. When one player is as dominant as Google, it's difficult for the others to make any significant gains, as users tend to use what they're used to using, and for most people, by far, that's Google.

For more information, including charts:
- see the comScore press release