1 in 5 Google Visits Come from Browser Search Box

AT Internet Institute released its monthly Search Engine Barometer for the month of February, revealing some interesting findings. For one – one out of every five Google visits is attributed to the browser search bar. That’s 20.1% of Google visits – three times more than Live Search (7%) and ten times more than Yahoo (2.3%).

Other noteworthy findings from the report include:

- Google dominated (of course) with 91.27% of visits (91.23% in January 2009),

- Yahoo, 2nd, rose for the first time in a year: 2.50% in February vs. 2.43% in January 2009

- Live Search, 3rd, had the highest month over month increase (+0.08 point) to reach 2.36%

- AOL, 4th (1.36% of visits), dropped by 0.04 point after a 3-month stabilization period

- Orange, 5th, lost ground and fell below 1% visit share

After most of the search engines saw little if any growth in January’s report, February saw a little more activity. With Microsoft’s Live Search accelerators built into Internet Explorer 8, it will be interesting to see if Live Search gets any kind of a boost from that, if even a miniscule one.