The Bing-Yahoo tag-team continues to chip away at Google’s dominance in search, according to the latest report from Experian Hitwise, while Google has slipped a little yet still maintains a commanding grip on its overal dominance among search engines. Combined, however, Bing-powered search and google.com account for 93.14% of all searches conducted in the United States.
Although the share of Bing-powered search, which includes Bing.com and Yahoo, slightly declined from April to May, moving from 28.25% to 28.12%, it’s still 5% more than where those numbers were in May 2011 at 26.79%. Individually, Bing ranked slightly behind Yahoo in search shares, 13.17% to 14.95%, respectively.
Alternately, Google’s year-over-year percentage of the search market has declined 5% but the search leader maintained 65.02% of the U.S. search market, down from 68.11% in May 2011.
Meanwhile, search engines not a part of Google or Bing-Yahoo barely made a blip on the search market as all other search engines account for 6.86% of U.S. searches.
The Experian Hitwise data also reveals that our brains are apparently devolving into a grayish-pink pudding-like substance as the number of one-word searches increased 5% from April 2012 to May 2012 and is up 19% from May 2011. Two-word, three-word, four-word, and nth-word searches are all on the decline year-over-year. Alas, people seem to be finally catching on that you can’t overload a search engine with too many words as six-, seven-, and eight-word searches are all in a big decline over the past year.
Experian Hitwise General Manager Simon Bradstock expects one reason shorter searches have grown is because search engines have become better at anticipating search queries. “As automated search features have rolled out across the major search engines, we can expect to see one-word searches continue to increase as they have over the past year,” he said. “The long tail is not going away, rather just becoming more intensified within the shorter queries, and in turn marketers need to focus more on how consumers start their searches.”
The internet overlords have trained us well.