October, 2008 was a raucous month for America and search markets. Upheaval in the financial markets, showdowns in politics and hallows on Halloween all contributed to unprecedented query volume. Collectively, the top search engines broke 10 billion query mark for web searches.
Not much changed, though, in terms of how the search engines performed individually last month. There was some minor jostling between Yahoo! (YHOO) and Windows Live Search and Google (GOOG) continued to maintain its gigantic lead.

Full story: seekingalpha.com