Experian Hitwise released its search market share numbers for the four weeks ending August 27.
Key findings are as follows:
- Google accounted for 65.09% of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending August 27, 2011.
- Bing-powered search comprised 28.99% of searches for the month
- Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 15.89 percent and 13.10 percent, respectively.
- The remaining 64 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 5.92 percent of U.S. searches.
That last point really drives home just how hard it is to compete in the search market in the U.S. 64 engines together make up less than 6% and the top three are really the top 2 (I assume if you’re reading this, you’re familiar with the Yahoo/Bing deal).
Google is down by a percent, Bing-powered search is up by 3%. Yahoo specifically is up 5% and Bing specifically is up 1%.
Another interesting finding is that longer search queries, classified as those averaging five to eight words or more, increased by 3% month-to-month.
I wonder if the increase in longer search queries is a testament to people getting better at searching or the search engines not delivering as well on the shorter ones.