WebProNews

Microsoft's Bing accounted for 5.25 percent of all U.S. searches for the month of June, according to the latest data from Hitwise.

Google continued to hold on to its dominant position growing 7 percent year-over- year capturing 74.04 percent of the U.S. search market for the month.

Yahoo landed in the second position with 16.19 percent of the search market, but saw its growth drop 17 percent year-over-year, while Ask received 3.15 percent of searches with its growth slipping 22 percent year-over-year.

The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.36 percent of U.S. searches.

Looking at the weekly percentage of U.S. searches for Bing, it has grown at an average weekly rate of 25 percent for the month of June, Adding in Live.com and MSN Search along with Bing, the combined search engine have grown at an average of 16 percent during the month. Bing grew faster than the three other top search engines for the month.

The length of search queries has increased over the past year. Longer search queries, averaging five to more than eight words in length, increased 8 percent between June 2008 and June 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 16 percent. The same time period showed that shorter queries - those averaging one to four words long - have decreased 2 percent. Searches of two words accounted for the majority of searches, making up 22.88 percent of all queries.

Search engines continue to be the most popular way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing June 2009 with June 2008, business and finance, entertainment, online video and sports categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.