New research from Hitwise has revealed that Google accounted for 72.4% of all US searches conducted in the four weeks ending 25 April 2009.
Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com received 16.3%, 5.7%% and 4%, respectively.
The remaining 49 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.4% of US searches.
| Percentage of US searches among leading search engine providers |
| Domain |
April 2008 |
March 2009 |
April 2009 |
Year-over-year percent change |
| www.google.com |
67.93% |
72.39% |
72.74% |
7% |
| search.yahoo.com |
20.29% |
16.36% |
16.27% |
-20% |
| search.msn.com |
6.27%* |
5.50%* |
5.68%* |
-9% |
| www.ask.com |
4.17% |
4.07% |
3.95% |
-5% |
| Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending 25 April, 2009; 28 March, 2009; and 25 April, 2008) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US internet users. |
| *Includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com |
| Source: Hitwise |
Hitwise also found that the length of search queries has increased over the past year. Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, increased 7% between April 2008 and April 2009, while searches of eight or more words increased 18%.
Shorter search queries – those averaging one to four words long – decreased 2% over the same time period. Searches of two words comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 23% of all queries.
Search engines continue to be the primary way internet users navigate to key industry categories, said Hitwise. Comparing April 2009 with April 2008, business and finance, sports and online video categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.
In mid-April, SearchIgnite published a report which found that US ad spending among its clients was down 4% in the first three months of the year when compared to the same period a year earlier (see US search advertising showing signs of first quarter decline).
However, it noted an improvement in March, when spending rose 11% year over year. February spending was flat and January’s was down 14%, it said.
Analyst Screen Digest, meanwhile, predicted that US online advertising will fall 5% in 2009 (see US online advertising forecast to fall 5% in 2009).
It said that while internet advertising grew 10% in 2008, the fourth quarter was almost flat at +2.6%, a significant change from the first nine months of the year which were up approximately 15%.
