Google’s paid-clicks in the US, the source of its fortune, showed weak, almost imperceptible growth for the third month in a row, according to comScore, just a couple of days before Google was scheduled to post its Q1 financial results.

The tabulator says they were up only 2.7% in March and just 1.8% for the whole first quarter, a nasty, nasty drop from the 48% it supposedly recorded in the third quarter of last year or even its 25% growth in the fourth quarter.

Google was down 0.3% in January and up 3.1% in February.

It’s believed the only way it can make lowered expectations – cut because of comScore – is to be getting more per click and it’s a toss-up whether it could have gotten enough. Optimists say comScore data hasn’t correlated that well with Google’s financial results in the past.

Google is supposed to be trying to improve the quality of its clicks.

US paid clicks for Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL all declined in March, according to comScore, and the trend has been chalked up to the economic slowdown and consumer sentiment.

Be that as it may, total searches through the top five search engines were up to 10.77 billion in March from 9.88 billion in February and Google is supposed to have increased its share of US search in March to 59.8%, some 6.4 billion searches, as against 59.2% in February.

Yahoo was down at 21.3%, Microsoft down at 9.4% and AOL down at 4.8%.