Bing Continues to Gain Ground, Amazon is Top Retail Site by Paid Traffic
Another month, another gain for Bing-powered search, according to Experian Hitwise.
According to the data information services company, Google topped the list of search engines in the U.S. with 69.67 percent of searches in December, down 1 percent from its 70.10 percent share in November.
Yahoo followed with 15.17 percent, unchanged from its share in the previous month, while Bing had 10.60 percent, up 5 percent from its 10.10 percent in November.
Bing-powered search (or the combination of Yahoo and Bing) grabbed 25.77 percent of U.S. searches in December, up 2 percent from its 25.27 percent share in November.
Bing led the way with the highest success rate in December, as 81.68 percent of queries conducted resulted in a visit to a website. This was up slightly from its 81.30 percent success rate in November.
Yahoo followed with an 81.47 percent success rate, up slightly from its 81.40 percent success rate in the prior month.
Google was third with a 65.57 percent success rate, up 1 percent from its 64.91 percent mark in November.
“The share of unsuccessful searches highlights the opportunity for both the search engines and marketers to evaluate the search engine result pages to ensure that searchers are finding the information they are seeking,” according to Hitwise.
The company also highlighted the top retail sites receiving paid search traffic. Amazon topped the list with 12.03 percent of all paid clicks for the four weeks ending Jan. 1, a 51 percent surge from its 7.98 percent share in November.
Target followed with 5.19 percent of all paid clicks for retail sites, while Search had 3.48 percent, JCPenney had 3.23 percent and Walmart had 3.04 percent.
Hitwise also notes that shorter search queries rose in popularity in December. Overall, queries averaging one to four words in length increased 1 percent from November to December, with two-word searches accounting for the majority of this segment.
Longer search queries were down 4 percent during this same span.
According to comScore, Google finished with 66.6 percent of the search engine market in December, up 0.4 percentage points from its 66.2 percent share in November.
Yahoo followed with 16 percent, while Microsoft had 12 percent. Ask.com finished the year with 3.5 percent of the market, while AOL had 1.9 percent.
More than 16.4 billion queries were conducted in December, according to comScore. This was up 3 percent from the previous month’s 16.0 billion queries.
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