Two-Word Queries Are the Most Popular in September
Experian Hitwise recently unveiled its most recent search engine numbers, which show that Google remains way ahead of the pack, Bing-powered search lost some of its piece of the pie and that two-word queries were the most popular in September.
Google finished September with 72.15 percent of the U.S. market, up about 0.8 percent from 71.59 percent in August.
Meanwhile, Bing-powered search (Bing and Yahoo together) accounted for 23.64 percent of the market, down 2.1 percent from 24.15 percent in August.
Of the total share for Bing-powered search, Bing accounted for 10.10 percent (up 2.3 percent) while Yahoo made up 13.54 percent (down 5.2 percent).
Ask.com finished with 2.37 percent of the U.S. search market, up 3.9 percent from the 2.28 percent share it held in August. IAC’s Barry Diller recently stirred a small firestorm when he said that Ask.com didn’t have any value in IAC when discussing the company’s stock.
Google remains the biggest sender of upstream traffic to the Automotive, Health, Shopping and Travel verticals, according to Hitwise. The search giant accounted for 22.38 percent of upstream traffic to the Automotive vertical in the U.S. in September, 16.29 percent of upstream traffic to the Health vertical, 20.10 percent of upstream traffic to the Shopping vertical and 30.03 percent of upstream traffic to the Travel vertical.
Yahoo sent 4.77 percent of the upstream traffic to Automotive sites, 3.29 percent to Health sites, 4.17 percent to Shopping and 4.22 percent to Travel.
Bing ranked behind Google and Yahoo in all four verticals, but displayed the biggest growth in each.
About a month ago, Robin Goad, research director of Hitwise UK, posted about how Google Instant will highlight the long tail. While the company’s latest data isn’t exactly fit to help make any conclusions about that expectation, it may offer a small peephole into what the future may hold for longer searches.
In September, two-word queries were the most popular when ranked by clicks, with a 24.02 percent share, up 1 percent from August.
One-word queries followed with 23.23 percent, up 3 percent, while three-word queries had 19.97 percent of clicks, down 1 percent.
Meanwhile, four-word queries had 13.61 percent of clicks, down 3 percent, followed by five-word queries with 8.23 percent, down 2 percent, and six-word queries with 4.51 percent, down 3 percent.
Queries with eight or more keywords got 3.85 percent of clicks in September, up 4 percent. Seven-word queries got 2.58 percent of clicks, up 1 percent.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/diller-ask-com-has-no-value-inside-of-iac/
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2010/09/google_instant_to_highlight_th.html
