Bing, Google, Longer Keywords and Top Search Terms in October

According to recent data released by Experian Hitwise, Bing gained market share in October while Google and Yahoo! lost a bit of the search pie.

Google finished October with 70.60 percent of searches conducted in the U.S., a 1 percent decline from the previous month’s 71.08 percent share.

Yahoo! ended the month with 16.14 percent of all searches in the U.S., a 1 percent drop from 16.38 percent in September.

Meanwhile, Bing finished October with 9.57 percent of the search market, a 7 percent increase from its 8.96 percent share in September.

Ask.com handled 2.62 percent of searches in the U.S. in October, a 2 percent month-over-month increase.

“The remaining 52 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.10 percent of U.S. searches,” Experian Hitwise noted in its press release.

The same report highlighted the increase in longer queries in October. During the month, one-word searches accounted for 24.03 percent of all searches in the U.S., a 1 percent drop from 24.32 percent in September.

Two-word queries accounted for 23.13 percent of all searches, a 2 percent drop from 23.55 percent in the previous month, while three-word queries accounted for 20.53 percent of all searches, virtually unchanged from 20.52 percent in September.

Four-word searches accounted for 13.83 percent of the total in October, a 1 percent month-over-month increase. Meanwhile, five-word searches made up 8.13 percent of all searches in the month, a 2 percent increase.

Searches that were six words in length accounted for 4.42 percent of all searches, a 3 percent increase.

Seven-word searches (2.43 percent) and eight-or-more-word searches (3.49 percent) each increased 4 percent from September.

Experian Hitwise also took a glimpse of the large amounts of upstream traffic from search engines and Google in particular during October.

Sports, News and Media, Entertainment, Business and Finance, Automotive, Online Video and Social Networking were all categories that saw double-digit month-over-month growth in their upstream traffic from search engines.

In a separate set of data, Experian Hitwise notes that “facebook” was the top overall search term for the four weeks ending Nov. 7, 2009, with 1.46 percent of all clicks. It was followed by “myspace” (0.94 percent), “youtube” (0.78 percent), craigslist (0.64 percent), “facebook login” (0.62 percent), “facebook.com” (0.35 percent), “myspace.com” (0.32 percent), “ebay” (0.32 percent), “www.facebook.com” (0.18 percent) and “youtube.com” (0.17 percent).

Sources:</strong

http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/google-searches-10-09/

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