New York, N.Y., Jan. 14, 2010 - Experian® Hitwise® announced today that Google accounted for 72.25 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Jan. 2, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 14.83 percent, 8.92 percent and 2.54 percent, respectively. The remaining 66 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.48 percent of U.S. searches.
Shorter searches are flat this past month
Shorter search queries, averaging searches of one to four words in length, were flat between November and December 2009. Searches of one and two words increased 1 percent. The same time period showed that longer search queries - those averaging five to more than eight words long - were down 2 percent from month to month. Searches of one word comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 24.34 percent of all queries.
| Percentage of U.S. clicks by number of keywords | |||
| Subject | Nov-09 | Dec-09 | Month-over-month percentage change |
| One word | 24.13% | 24.34% | 1% |
| Two words | 23.14% | 23.41% | 1% |
| Three words | 20.37% | 20.32% | 0% |
| Four words | 13.84% | 13.79% | 0% |
| Five words | 8.13% | 8.02% | -1% |
| Six words | 4.43% | 4.37% | -1% |
| Seven words | 2.43% | 2.37% | -2% |
| Eight or more words | 3.54% | 3.38% | -5% |
| Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending Nov. 28, 2009, and Jan. 2, 2010) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. | |||
| Source: Experian Hitwise | |||
Google is greatest source of traffic to key U.S. industries; Bing continues to see growth to verticals
Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing December 2009 with December 2008, Automotive, Business and Finance, Entertainment, News and Media, Social Networking and Sports categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.
Google was sending the most visits to the four categories below among the top three search engines. Google's percentage of upstream traffic grew for the Automotive, Shopping and Travel categories. Bing saw double-digit growth among all four categories and Yahoo! Search saw double-digit growth in the Shopping category, as seen in the table below.
| Percentage of U.S. upstream traffic from search engines among verticals | |||||||||
| Yahoo! Search | Bing* | ||||||||
| Domain | Dec. 2008 | Dec. 2009 | Year-over-year percentage change | Dec. 2008 | Dec. 2009 | Year-over-year percentage change | Dec. 2008 | Dec. 2009 | Year-over-year percentage change |
| Automotive | 18.77% | 21.13% | 13% | 4.30% | 3.82% | -11% | 1.27% | 2.26% | 78% |
| Health | 31.91% | 31.09% | -3% | 6.31% | 4.73% | -25% | 1.70% | 3.29% | 94% |
| Shopping | 18.36% | 19.95% | 9% | 4.26% | 4.73% | 11% | 1.31% | 2.25% | 72% |
| Travel | 27.09% | 29.55% | 9% | 4.99% | 4.02% | -19% | 1.88% | 2.78% | 48% |
| Note: Data is based on monthly upstream traffic from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Figures are for web searches only. | |||||||||
| *This includes executed searches on Bing.com, Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com. | |||||||||
| Source: Experian Hitwise | |||||||||
About Experian Hitwise
Experian Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Experian Hitwise gives marketers a competitive advantage by providing daily insights on how 25 million Internet users around the world interact with more than 1 million Web sites. This external view helps companies grow and protect their businesses by identifying threats and opportunities as they develop. Experian Hitwise has more than 1,500 clients across numerous sectors, including financial services, media, travel and retail.
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