Bing's Search Share Rises For 3rd Straight Month

Google received 71 percent of U.S. searches; Length of eight-plus keyword searches increases 4 percent

New York, N.Y., March 10, 2010 - Experian® Hitwise® announced today that Google accounted for 70.95 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Feb. 27, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 14.57 percent, 9.70 percent and 2.84 percent, respectively.

The remaining 73 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.94 percent of U.S. searches.

Longer searches increase this past month

Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, were up 3 percent between January 2010 and February 2010. Searches of eight or more words increased 4 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries - those averaging one to four words long - were down 1 percent from month to month. Two word searches comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 22.85 percent of all queries.

Google is greatest source of traffic to key U.S. industries; Bing sees continued growth to verticals

Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing February 2010 with January 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 below. Google's percentage of upstream traffic grew for the Automotive, Shopping and Travel categories. Bing saw double-digit growth among three categories, including a 113 percent increase in the Automotive category.

Source: Experian Hitwise