Bing Driving Nearly a Quarter of Search Traffic, Booming in Verticals
Bing-powered search is now driving nearly a quarter of all searches in the U.S., according to the latest figures from Experian Hitwise.
For the four weeks ending Aug. 28, Google claimed 71.59 percent of U.S. searches, which reflected a minor bump up from its 71.43 percent in July.
Yahoo was in second place with 14.28 percent of searches during the month, down 1 percent from 14.43 percent in July.
Meanwhile, Bing had 9.87 percent of searches in August, virtually unchanged from its 9.86 percent share in the previous month.
Experian Hitwise notes that for the first week of the combined Bing-powered searches on Bing and Yahoo (thanks to the search deal forged between the two companies in 2009), Yahoo brought 14.32 percent of all searches to the table, while Bing brought 10.24 percent. This means Bing-powered searches accounted for 24.56 percent of the total for the week ending Aug. 28.
A look at more recent data from Experian Hitwise shows that Google handled 71.33 percent of all searches for the four weeks ending Sept. 4, followed by Yahoo with 14.32 percent and Bing with 10.04 percent (24.36 percent combined).
For this period, Ask.com had 2.31 percent of the U.S. search market, followed by AOL with 1.22 percent.
For the four weeks ending Sept. 4, Google boasted 66.11 percent of all visits to search engines, followed by Yahoo with 11.55 percent, Bing with 10.74 percent, Ask.com with 2.17 percent and AOL with 1.19 percent.
In August, Google maintained its strong lead in its upstream traffic to the Automotive, Health, Shopping and Travel verticals. It was responsible for 23.13 percent of upstream traffic to Automotive sites, 30.60 percent to Health sites, 20.07 percent to Shopping sites and 30.05 percent to Travel sites.
Yahoo accounted for 4.49 percent of upstream traffic to Automotive sites, 5.08 percent to Health sites, 3.98 percent to Shopping sites and 4.19 percent to Travel sites.
Bing was responsible for 3.10 percent of upstream traffic to Automotive sites, 3.82 percent to Health sites, 2.75 percent to Shopping sites and 3.33 percent to Travel sites. Though it lags behind Google and Yahoo, Bing has displayed the biggest year-over-year growth in all four verticals – up 65 percent for Automotive, 24 percent for Health, 66 percent for Shopping and 47 percent for Travel.
Experian Hitwise also found that longer queries saw slight month-over-month declines in clicks in August, while one- and two-word queries saw small growth.
Sources:
http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/google-searches-08-10/
http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-10133.html
