Bing-powered search continues to see happy days as it gained ground on Google in February and saw noticeably higher “success” rates than the biggest search engine in the land, according to Experian Hitwise. The company also revealed sites that saw spikes in traffic after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
According to Hitwise, Google finished February with 66.69 percent of all U.S. searches, down 2 percent from its 67.95 percent share in January.
Meanwhile, Bing-powered search claimed 28.48 percent of the market, up 4 percent from its 27.44 percent share in January. When broken down into its two segments, Yahoo had 14.99 percent of the market, up 3 percent month-over-month, while Bing had 13.49 percent of the market, up 5 percent month-over-month.
The remaining 69 search engines in the U.S. accounted for 4.68 percent of searches in February, according to Hitwise.
Yahoo boasted the highest success rate in February among the leading search engine providers, with 81.51 percent of searches executed leading to a visit to a website. Bing followed with a success rate of 81.27 percent, while Google trailed with a success rate of 65.80 percent.
Overall, longer search queries (five or more words) saw 2 percent fewer clicks in February compared to January, while shorter queries (one to four words) were flat. One-word searches were the most popular in February, accounting for 23.86 percent of clicks, up 2 percent from January.
Hitwise also shared via Twitter the two websites that saw the biggest boosts in Web traffic in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan: MSNBC and YouTube. The company also shared that “japan earthquake” was the eighth most-searched-for term on March 11 in the U.S., placing it higher than “mapquest” and “google.”
MSNBC received the most traffic (13.66 percent) from searches for “japan earthquake” on March 11, while YouTube was second (9.17 percent). The very next day, those two sites switched places.
For the week ending March 12, the five fastest-moving search terms were Japan-related, according to Hitwise.
Of course, the disaster in Japan also sparked a rise in nefarious online scams. According to Sophos, Japan-related scams popped up inside of the first three hours of the earthquake.
Sources:</strong
http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/experian-hitwise-reports-bing-search-increase/
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