WebProNews

Search spending from retailers was up 36 percent year-over-year in the second quarter across all major search engines, according to a new report from SearchIgnite.

The trend was not seen in other categories, such as travel and finance, and U.S. search spend was down 6.5 percent for the quarter.

Retail search spend increased steadily as the quarter went on, with June showing an increase in spend of 55 percent compared with June 2008.

"We've seen very strong paid search spend from retailers for the last several quarters, a trend that can be attributed to an increase in retailer's promotional activity as they turn to heavy discounting and sales to drive purchases," said Roger Barnette, President of SearchIgnite.

Google continued to lead with 77 percent of search market spend. Yahoo showed declined in Q2, coming in at 17 percent of spend and with their search share down 26 percent compared with a year earlier.

The launch of Microsoft's new search engine Bing, showed little impact on its share of paid search advertising. Microsoft's search spend remained at 6 percent in Q2.

"Microsoft appears to be focusing its efforts on driving consumer interest and capturing increased search query share," said Barnette.

"We have not yet seen this translate into more paid search advertising dollars for Microsoft, although typically consumer adoption precedes advertiser adoption."