Google captured 72.15 percent of all U.S. searches in September and gained one percent in search share month-over-month, according to a new report from Hitwise.

  Bing powered search received 23.64 percent of searches for the month with Yahoo Search and Bing receiving 13.54 percent and 10.10 percent, respectively. The remaining 65 search engines1 in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 4.22 percent of U.S. searches.

 Search engines continue to be the primary way that Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing August 2010 with September 2010, shopping and social networking categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

 Google’s percentage of upstream traffic grew for the Automotive, Shopping and Travel categories. Bing saw double-digit growth in four categories — automotive, health, shopping and travel — including a 61 percent increase in the health category.

 Longer search queries — those averaging five to eight words long — decreased 1 percent from August 2010 to September 2010. Seven-word searches and searches of eight or more words increased 1 percent and 4 percent, respectively. One-word searches increased 3 percent. Two-word searches represented the majority of searches, amounting to 24.02 percent of all queries. Shorter search queries — one to four words — were flat from August 2010 to September 2010.