The search engine wars are still on, and while Microsoft is seeing an uptick in its search share…it mostly seems to come at the expense of partner Yahoo.

Microsoft has been working hard to raise its share of the Internet search market, aggressively promoting its Bing search engine and striking a ten-year deal with Yahoo to have Bing power Yahoo searches. And the latest search engine share numbers from media analysis firm Comscore suggest some of that effort is paying off, with Microsoft sites showing the greatest month-to-month increase in the industry. However, the growth doesn’t seem to be slowing Google; in fact, it seems to mostly be coming at the expense of new-partner Yahoo.

Comscore’s latest rankings cover U.S. Internet users for November 2009; according to the figures, Microsoft sites (including Bing) saw a 0.4 percent increase compared to October 2009, jumping to a 10.3 percent share of the U.S. search market. However, Yahoo sites saw a 0.5 decline during the same period, dropping from an even 18 percent of the market in October to 17.5 percent in November.

Read More: Digital Trends

New conventional wisdom for the Web age: If jobs go down, then the Internet goes up. It’s pretty straightforward logic: If you’ve got nothing else to do, then you’re more apt to watch Hulu, play Farmville, whatever.

But here’s a data set that seems to belie that: New statistics from Nielsen that seem to show that people are spending less time on their browsers than they did a year ago.

If you believe Nielsen’s stats, Web users are heading to their PCs a little less often (sessions per person–down 11 percent)  and doing less once they get there (domains visited per person–down 20 percent). Except when it comes to clicking, which they’re happy to do (Web pages per person–up 11 percent).

Read More:  D|All Things Digital. MediaMemo by Peter Kafka

Discover the truth about a site’s online traffic

You can find the traffic of a popular website (and compare it to another site) by entering the URL into compete.com. Or quantcast. This data is far more accurate than the charts Alexa offers, because most of the sites being measured cooperate. I’m pretty proud of Squidoo hitting the top 100 sites in the US.

Read more: seth godin