Forresters Charlene Li shares some snippets from a consumer survey conducted on US households. Some of the data is unsurprising but it does make for interesting reading.

• Google continues to lead as the site consumers use most frequently to search the Internet, while Yahoo! lost share from 2003.
• MSN gained substantial share as the default home page for online consumers. + Among Google's loyal searchers, many were likely to have MSN and Yahoo! as their default home pages, opening up the possibility that these portals will regain search loyalty.
• MSN has a slight lead in the percent of consumers who use its toolbar.
• Almost half of all toolbar users also use another toolbar.
• Google tops the list in terms of search effectives (as ranked by their own loyal searchers) but overall quality remains poor, leading consumers to use multiple search engines.

I find it very difficult to break the Google habbit (and there's mostly no reason why i should) but I have in recent months been turning to Yahoo! a significant proportion of the time.

I cant seem to take Clusty seriously, no matter what good things i hear :)