New Experian Hitwise stats regarding the search market in August have arrived, and truth be told, they’re not that exciting; very little changed compared to July.  However, August did act as a sort of baseline for the Bing-Yahoo combo.

Experian Hitwise noted in an official statement, "The percentage of U.S. searches for the one-week ending Aug. 28, 2010 for the Bing combined powered search accounted for 24.56 percent, as Yahoo! Search and Bing received 14.32 percent and 10.24 percent, respectively."

That’s perhaps not a terrible starting point.  After all, Ask, AOL, and lots of other companies can only dream of performing one out of every 20 searches, never mind one out of four.

The bad news for Yahoo and Bing is that they still didn’t gain ground on Google in August.  Google’s market share rose from 71.43 percent to 71.59 percent on a month-over-month basis, while Yahoo’s market share fell (from 14.43 percent to 14.28 percent) and Bing made only the tiniest bit of progress.

Plus, Experian Hitwise observed that "Google delivered the most visits" to its Automotive, Health, Shopping, and Travel categories.

The big search announcement Google’s supposed to make later today may not play in Yahoo and Bing’s favor, either.