Good golly, Google. Search giant steals share from Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo

The three major search-engine companies have all flooded the media with news of product enhancements and big developments in the past two weeks. Both Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) had big show-and-tell days to highlight some impressive new tricks their tech teams have put together. Microsoft's Bing rolled out enhanced visual search results. Google, meantime, unveiled jaw-dropping automated language translation and voice-activated search features. Then there was Google Goggles, a feature that allows people to snap images and use that as a cue to pull up relevant search results. (Google is not the first to do that but its version is impressive).

All of that said, in the core search market, the month of November was all about Google, as the Mountain View, Calif. market leader grew its U.S. search share by a full percentage point to 71.6%, according to Web traffic tracker Hitwise.