New York — According to the latest Experian Hitwise statistics, search engines — Bing is making progress in certain search verticals, as well as Internet pioneer Yahoo Inc. witnessed gains in its share of the U.S. Internet search market in March, Hitwise reported Wednesday. While Google Inc. lost market share in March to Ask.com, which increased for the fourth consecutive month.
According to Hitwise’s April 7 research data, Google marginally dropped to 69.97 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending March 27, 2010, witnessing a slight decline from 70.95% in the prior month.
Yahoo! Search share gained by 3 percent to 15.04 percent and Bing fell for the third straight month, falling 1 percent to 9.62 percent. Microsoft Corp.’s Bing’s U.S. market share declined from 9.70 to 9.62 percent between February and March.
Perhaps surprisingly, Ask was the big winner, increasing 21 percent month-on-month to 3.44 percent. The rest of the 69 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.93 percent of U.S. searches.
In a related news, Hitwise mentioned that lengthier search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, were leveled between February 2010 and March 2010. But, searches of eight or more words increased 1 percent.
However, the same period accounted that shorter search queries — those averaging one to four words long — also were inactive from month to month. One-word searches comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 22.98 percent of all queries.
Search engines continue to be the major source for Internet users navigating key industry categories. Comparing February 2010 with March 2010, Automotive, Business and Finance, Entertainment, News and Media, Shopping and Social Networking categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.
Comparatively, Google witnessed year-over-year gains of up to 12 percent (for Shopping) in those verticals, although its total market share in all areas continues to exceed Bing by double digits. The data is based on monthly upstream traffic from Hitwis”s sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users.