Bing And Yahoo Lose Google Dominates U.S. Search Market In September: Hitwise

New York — The search alliance between Bing and Yahoo have not been able to shake Google’s dominance. In fact, the search engine giant Google is still rocking the charts as the top U.S. search destination. According to the latest figures from Hitwise, an online analytics service, reveals that Google, the dominant search engine leader, captured 72.15% of all U.S. searches in September, with its search share gaining one percent month-over-month, and rivals Yahoo and Microsoft Bing taking a hit.

Bing-powered search sites still no match for Google, although there has been little change from August to September in terms of the percentage of users who access the Big Three search sites — Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But finally, Google had a good month in September that is up slightly from 71.59% in August. Microsoft Bing, which is Google’s biggest arch-rival, did not have such a great month in September, though.

According to the numbers quoted by Hitwise, Google accounted for 72.15% of searches in September 2010, demonstrating a 1% increase over August. That indicates that Google was still a wee shy of capturing three-fourths of the entire online search market at 72.15% for September. Yet, the Mountain View, California-based company is still dominating its rivals by a pretty healthy degree.

Meanwhile, Hitwise reported that Bing-powered search sites witnessed a net loss of 2% last month, handling 23.64% of U.S. searches for the month, with Yahoo grabbing 13.54% and Bing itself pulling in 10.10%. Even though Bing.com fielded 10.10% of queries, searches conducted on Yahoo sites declined by nearly 5%. This resulted in overall losses for Bing-powered results.

The recent Hitwise report indicates that Yahoo endured after integration, while Bing saw only a small bump.

“It is a pretty small slip and only based on a month’s worth of data,” said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. “I’m sure that these are not the results that Bing marketers are looking for… but the holiday season might be key for them. Search engines receive a real workout with all of the holiday shopping, travel planning and the like. It will be interesting to see how Bing fares over the next three months or so.”

As far as month-over-month traffic goes, the results for each of the three measured engines did not change to a significant degree between August and September (65 other search engines tracked by Hitwise reached a combined total of 4.22 percent of all U.S. online searches for September.)

The biggest monthly loss came from Yahoo, which shuffled off five percent of its previous month’s market share in dropping from 14.2 to 13.5% of all U.S. searches. Ask.com pulled up the biggest amount of new visitors, percentage-wise, by upping its online search share from a mighty 2.28 to 2.37%.

At the same time, Hitwise indicates that Bing and Yahoo demonstrated impressive year-over-year gains in driving shopping traffic last month. Bing witnessed double-digit growth in four groups — automotive, health, shopping and travel — including a 61% increase in the health category.

Search engines continue to be the ultimate way that Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Hitwise also discovered that Google has maintained a strong lead in driving traffic to key industries. Google saw gains across all verticals, delivering a total of 22.38% of automotive traffic, 16.29% of health, 20.10% of shopping and 30.03% of travel.

Brands that want to plan holiday search ad campaigns for either Yahoo or Bing sites should migrate their paid search accounts to the Microsoft adCenter now, if they have not already. According to tech site Brafton, Yahoo has set an October 25 deadline for adCenter migration. Moreover, the earlier campaigns are switched, the more likely marketers will see success in the transition to Bing-powered ads on both sites this season.