Bing Searches Increase 7 Percent in October 2009
Google Receives 70 percent of searches for same period
Press reports reflect that that Google accounted for 70.60 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 31, 2009. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 16.14 percent, 9.57 percent and 2.62 percent, respectively. The remaining 52 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.10 percent of U.S. searches.
| Percentage of U.S. searches among leading search engine providers | |||
| Domain | September 2009 | October 2009 | Month-over-month percent change |
| www.google.com | 71.08% | 70.60% | -1% |
| search.yahoo.com | 16.38% | 16.14% | -1% |
| www.bing.com* | 8.96% | 9.57% | 7% |
| www.ask.com | 2.56% | 2.62% | 2% |
| Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending Oct. 31, 2009, and Oct. 3, 2009) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. | |||
| *This includes executed searches on Bing.com, Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com. | |||
| Source: Experian Hitwise | |||
Longer searches increase this past month
Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, increased 3 percent between October and September 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 4 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries – those averaging one to four words long – decreased 1 percent from month to month. Searches of one word comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 24.03 percent of all queries.
| Percentage of U.S. clicks by number of keywords | |||
| Subject | September 2009 | October 2009 | Month-over-month percent change |
| One word | 24.32% | 24.03% | -1% |
| Two words | 23.55% | 23.13% | -2% |
| Three words | 20.52% | 20.53% | 0% |
| Four words | 13.69% | 13.83% | 1% |
| Five words | 7.94% | 8.13% | 2% |
| Six words | 4.30% | 4.42% | 3% |
| Seven words | 2.33% | 2.43% | 4% |
| Eight or more words | 3.35% | 3.49% | 4% |
| Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending Oct. 31, 2009, and Oct. 3, 2009) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. | |||
| Source: Experian Hitwise | |||
Google is a greater source of traffic to key U.S. industries
Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing October 2009 with October 2008, Automotive, Business and Finance, Entertainment, News and Media, Online Video, Social Networking and Sports categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.
| U.S. category upstream traffic from search engines and Google – October 2009 | ||||
| Category | Percentage of category traffic from search engines – October 2009 | Percent change in share of traffic from search engines – October 2008-October 2009 | Percentage of category traffic from Google – October 2009 | Percent change in share of traffic from Google – October 2008- October 2009 |
| Automotive | 30.21% | 18% | 21.22% | 19% |
| Business and Finance | 22.17% | 19% | 15.63% | 21% |
| Entertainment | 28.55% | 21% | 19.37% | 20% |
| Health and Medical | 42.72% | -5% | 30.98% | -3% |
| News and Media | 25.43% | 22% | 17.24% | 14% |
| Online Video** | 36.21% | 12% | 25.75% | 9% |
| Shopping and Classifieds | 27.27% | 8% | 19.06% | 9% |
| Social Networking** | 20.53% | 11% | 13.86% | 13% |
| Sports | 16.30% | 36% | 11.38% | 35% |
| Travel | 38.48% | 8% | 28.81% | 9% |
| Note: All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users.
**Denotes a custom category |
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| Source: Experian Hitwise | ||||