Hitwise: Ask Share of Searches Increases for Fourth Straight Month

Experian Hitwise announced today that Google accounted for 69.97 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending March 27, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask received 15.04 percent, 9.62 percent and 3.44 percent, respectively. The remaining 69 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.93 percent of U.S. searches.

In other news, Hitwise reported that longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, were flat between February 2010 and March 2010. But, searches of eight or more words increased 1 percent.

The same time period showed that shorter search queries -- those averaging one to four words long -- also were flat from month to month. One-word searches comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 22.98 percent of all queries.

Meanwhile, search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing February 2010 with March 2010, Automotive, Business and Finance, Entertainment, News and Media, Shopping and Social Networking categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

Among the top three search engines, Google sent the most visits to the four categories mentioned above. Google's percentage of upstream traffic grew for the Automotive, Shopping and Travel categories. Yahoo! Search saw gains in the Automotive category. Bing saw double-digit growth among three categories, including a 125 percent increase in the Health category.

As my daughter would say, that's "sick." And since she grew up in Massachusetts, sick means "wicked." And for those of you outside New England, that is a good thing.

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