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After losing a tiny bit of market share earlier this year, comScore announced today that Google is gaining again in the U.S. search market. The results are slight, only a 0.3% gain, but they have to be disappointing for Microsoft's Bing team.

Google basically gained share back from Yahoo, which lost 0.3% from September. comScore reports Google with 65.6% of the market, Microsoft's sites (Bing) with 14.8% (a 0.1% gain over September), and Yahoo (powered by Bing) with 15.2%. AOL and Ask are also covered in comScore's coverage, with a mere 1.5% and 2.9% of the market, respectively.

Analytics firm comScore released new data today showing that U.S. mobile social media audiences increased 37%, and more than half of social mobile audiences read a post from an organization, brand or event on their mobile device.

While the mobile browser accounted for more visits, research shows that the social networking app audience has grown five times faster in the past year. While the mobile browsing social networking audience has grown 24% to 42.3 million users, the mobile social networking app audience shot up 126% to 42.3 million users in the past year.

Internet analytics firm comScore released a report today that shows the most visited retail and auction sites on the Internet. Amazon, to no surprise, is the big winner with 282 million visitors in June. That correlates to 20.4% of the entire worldwide Internet population. Auction site eBay trailed Amazon sites by nearly 60 million visitors to land in second with 223.5 million, or 16.2% of all Internet retail consumers across the globe.

A relatively new entrant into this chart is Alibaba.com, a Chinese Internet retail vendor. It had 156.7 million users to come in third at 11.3%. China has the largest base of Internet users of any country in the world, and it is drawing heavily from the Asia Pacific region, with 85.7% of its visitors coming from the region. One interesting note from comScore's research is that it seems to have pinned the approximate number of global Internet users at 1.38 billion and change. Web-based retail has been a major force in the U.S. for more than a decade but is just now starting to change how the rest of the world interacts with consumer products.

Digital analytics firm comScore released a study that says that 7.1% of the entire U.S. mobile phone population uses location check-in services and 17.6% of smartphone users checked in during the month of March.

So much for the idea of check-in and location-based games being a fad. ComScore says that 12.6 million smartphone owners used check-in services like Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook Places. ComScore says that the check-in fervor is driven primarily by open by early adopters, who have "a high propensity for mobile media usage, including accessing retail sites and shopping guides, and displayed other characteristics of early adopters, including a stronger likelihood of owning a tablet device and accessing tech news, when compared to the average smartphone user."

Analytics firm comScore released numbers today on the penetration of mobile platforms in the consumer market. The findings show that if you take in to account all iOS devices - iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch - Apple is blowing away the rest of the mobile ecosystem.

The combined install base of Apple's triumvirate is 37.9 million, according to comScore. That far outreaches the Android install base (which includes smartphones and tablets like the Galaxy Tab) by 59%, as the Google operating system's install base is approximately 23.8 million devices.

"These data clearly illustrate the Apple ecosystem extends far beyond the iPhone," said Mark Donovan, comScore senior VP of mobile in a comScore press release. "Though it's frequently assumed that the Apple user base is composed of dedicated Apple 'fanboys', there's not a tremendous amount of overlapping mobile device access among these users. This of course has significant implications for the developer community as they consider the market potential in developing applications for different mobile platforms."

Google's social network Orkut never quite caught on in most countries, but it remains the most popular social network in Brazil. According to new data from comScore, Orkut remains safely ahead of Facebook there, with 36 million unique visitors last month. Facebook is only the third most popular social networking site in Brazil, but it is growing rapidly, and the site now attracts about 9 million visitors per month - up from just about 1.5 million a year ago. The second largest social networking site in Brazil is Windows Live, which reaches about 12.5 million visitors.

Americans spent more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google for the first time in August, and Yahoo edged out the search giant in monthly traffic, according to new data from marketing research firm comScore.

Users spent 41.1 billion minutes on Facebook in August, 39.8 billion minutes on Google, and 37.7 billion on Yahoo. Yahoo beat out Google in monthly traffic, with 179 million unique visitors to Google's 178.8 million. Microsoft came in third with 165.3 million.

Microsoft's share of the search market has been growing slowly since the company launched Bing.com - until last month, according to a report released today by research firm comScore.

Bing launched in June 2009 with 8.9 percent of searches, the share of the market that had been going through Microsoft's Live search, and climbed to 12.7 percent by June 2010. But Bing's growth slowed in July, according to comScore.

Numbers released from comScore today show that U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos online in the month of May, up from just over 30 billion in April. Hulu served up nearly 1.2 billion videos last month, nearly 3.5% of the overall market, while Google remained supreme, accounting for 43% of the market - a whopping 14.6 billion videos - with its powerhouse property, YouTube. Still, Hulu, a place where many watch full episodes of network television, is slowly inching from the pack, and Fox Interactive Media, sitting near the bottom of comScore's rankings, wants a piece of the action. They're target? Mobile.

At Techcrunch Disrupt last week, ComScore announced the "Start-up, Step-up" program to make their web analytics more accessible to new and small businesses.

While ComScore formerly charged a substantial setup fee for the implementation of their tracking pixel, now anyone can install it on their website for free. Furthermore, sites with less than one million unique visitors per month will be able to access the ComScore dashboard for free. And those with traffic between 1 and 2 million visitors per month will get a discounted pricing.