Google’s share of natural search traffic to enterprise-level sites in September increased to 76.68%. That is up from 74.7% last year and 75.89% in August. Bing’s share also increased, reaching 8.21%. That is up from 6.46% a year ago (MSN) and 8.06% in August.

Yahoo’s share decreased to 11.10%. A year ago it held 14.13% share, and in August it was at 11.83%. Also declining were AOL and Ask, who came in with 1.75% and 0.41% respectively. AOL declined year-over-year from 2.16%.

The results are perhaps not too surprising. The Web search market in general has been following a similar path. Compete data released last week showed that Google increased from 72.3% to 72.6% month-over-month, while Bing’s share crawled up from 8.7% to 8.8%. Yahoo’s share dropped from 15.8% in August to 14.7% in September.

As our own Doug Caverly noted, "Obviously, Microsoft’s incentive to forge a partnership will shrink if Bing can steal searchers away from Yahoo. Yahoo might need to hold its own (or at least lose to Google, but not Bing) in order to make sure Microsoft doesn’t think better of the arrangement before the 2010 target date."

Related Articles:

> Compete: Yahoo Stumbled In September

> Facebook/Twitter Use May Now Mean More for Google/Bing Rankings

> Microsoft and Google Score Deals with Twitter

Yahoo, which had one tough 2008, dropped three percent from the previous December, grabbing 17.79 percent; MSN bled down to 5.56 percent from just over seven percent, and Ask.com grabbed just over three percent total last month.

Hitwise indicates the numbers may be deceptive since MSN actually increased its search share over the last five months of the year.

Of the remaining 44 search engines Hitwise measures, together they account for merely 1.42 percent.

Searchers are clearly starting to trust Google more to find health information. Google directed nearly 32 percent of the traffic arriving at health and medical sites in December. The search juggernaut also controlled 27 percent of travel search, and 24.7 percent of online video searches, a 21 percent and 42 percent increase, respectively, over last year.
 

Remember also the inept attempt to develop a Francophilic Google competitor?

Well, from a competition standpoint, we may owe them a heartfelt Je suis désolé. That doesn’t mean "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" wasn’t funny, only that we may not have foreseen a Microsoft-reminiscent dominance approaching.

French metrics company XitiMonitor released it’s "search engine barometer" to show that Google’s share of the market in July reached 89.79 percent, leaving about 3 percent for Yahoo, 2.5 percent for MSN, and nearly two percent each for a pair of search engines you may have never heard of: Orange and Free.

And don’t bother asking about Ask.com. Nobody in Frogland is.

Google’s dominance isn’t really a recent phenomenon there, either. Over the past year, Google’s share has risen by just four points, not the forty or so you might expect if you follow US numbers.

Yahoo declined by 1.5 points over the same period, and is close to being overtaken by MSN, which managed a 7.7 percent increase.

"After Google and its ‘close’ competitors, it suffices to say that there remains little place for other search engines: from the 5th place (Free), the visit share is lower than 1 point, and from the 10th (Ask), it descends under the 0.1 point threshold," reads the release at XiTiMonitor.

And for all the cheap shots above, Je fais des excuses, mes amis francais; aucun sang, aucun mal.