Microsoft's search growth inches forward in June

Microsoft showed the most positive growth among the top five search engines in June, possibly due its recently launched "cashback" search program.

The Redmond company introduced its new program in late May, which rewards users of Live Search with rebates on product purchases.

It's not the retailers who provide the rebates, but rather Microsoft itself. The company offered an incentive program last year where it awarded prizes to players of an online game called 'Chicktionary.'

While still in third place by a large margin, Microsoft's search share increased .7 percent month-to-month to 9.2 percent in June among the "core" search engines, which include the five biggest properties. Similarly, its share of search queries jumped 15 percent to 1.06 billion.

Google maintained its dominance despite a .3 percent drop in share to 61.5 percent, with queries up six percent. Yahoo remained in second, with 20.9 percent of the market, up .3 percent, with a nine percent rise in search queries to 2.42 billion.

Rounding out the top five were Ask, with a 4.3 percent share (down .2 percent), and AOL with a 4.1 percent share (down .4 percent). Altogether, US surfers conducted about 11.5 billion searches during the month of June across these search engines, up seven percent from the previous month.

Expanding the numbers further to include the top ten biggest search engines: Fox Interactive Sites, eBay, Craiglist, Facebook, and Amazon, searchers conducted 16.67 billion queries, up eight percent overall.