Experian Hitwise announced today that Google accounted for 70.24 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Aug. 29, 2009. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 16.96 percent, 9.48 percent and 2.37 percent, respectively. The remaining 56 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 0.95 percent of U.S. searches.
A chart is available and shows that Bing was the only major search engine to have a positive month-over-month percent change (18%).
Experian Hitwise also notes that longer search queries (number of search terms) was down slightly in August.
Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, decreased 2 percent between July and August 2009. Searches of eight or more words decreased 2 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries - those averaging one to four words long - increased 1 percent. Searches of one word comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 24.21 percent of all queries.
A chart that's provided shows percentages for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight or more term search queries. A one search term search was number one in August with 24.21% (up 3% month over month) , two words at 23.71%, (up 1%) and three words at 20.74% (down 1%). For four words the percentage drops to 13.78%.
The findings clash with estimates from Nielsen, comScore and HitWise, all of whom found that Bing continued to post gains at the expense of Google, Yahoo or AOL in August. It will be a few weeks before those research firms post their September statistics.
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