Google Gains, Bing-Powered Search Loses in September
According to the latest numbers from Experian Hitwise, Google gained market share at the expense of the other major search engines in September.
Google finished September with 66.12 percent of U.S. searches among leading search engine providers, up 2 percent from its 65.09 percent share in August.
Bing-powered search finished September with 28.07 percent, down 3 percent from its 28.99 percent share in August. Of this share, Yahoo accounted for 15.27 percent (down 4 percent month-over-month) while Bing accounted for 12.80 percent (down 2 percent month-over-month).
Hitwise also found that 26.45 percent of U.S. queries were one word in length, followed by 23.66 percent that were two words.
Three-word queries accounted for 19.34 percent of searches, four-word queries accounted for 13.17 percent of searches, five-word queries accounted for 7.69 percent of searches, six-word queries accounted for 4.12 percent of searches and seven-word queries accounted for 2.26 percent of searches. Queries that were eight words or more in length accounted for 3.31 percent of U.S. searches during September.
According to comScore, Google Sites claimed 65.3 percent of the U.S. search market in September, up 0.5 percentage points from its 64.8 percent share in August.
Yahoo Sites claimed 15.5 percent of the search market in September, down 0.8 points from its 16.3 percent share in August. Microsoft Sites finished September with 14.7 percent of the market, unchanged from its stake in August.
Ask Network had 3.0 percent of the market in September, unchanged from its mark in August. AOL finished the list of the top five search engines with 1.5 percent of the market, up 0.2 points from its 1.3 percent share in August.
More than 17.1 billion explicit core searches were conducted in September, according to comScore. Google handled 11.2 billion of these queries, up 1 percent from the 11.1 billion queries handled in August.
Yahoo handled 2.6 billion queries, down 5 percent from the 2.8 billion queries it handled in the previous month. Meanwhile, Microsoft handled 2.5 billion queries in September, virtually unchanged from the number of queries handled in August.
Google’s third-quarter earnings rose 26 percent, which exceeded expectations. The search giant’s rate of paid clicks rose 28 percent compared to the same quarter last year.
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