Google accounted for 71.08 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 3, 2009, according to Hitwise data. The search giant saw a one percent gain from last month, while both Yahoo! and Bing dropped in September from last month, down three percent from 19.96 percent to 16.8 percent and down five percent from 9.48 percent to 8.96 percent respectively. Surprisingly, Ask.com showed a big increase of eight percent, from 2.37 percent to 2.56 percent of the market early in October.
In addition, Hitwise revealed that one-word queries accounted for the majority of all searches, amounting to 24.32 percent of all queries. In addition, longer search queries, averaging searches of five or more than eight words in length, increased two percent between August and September 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 6 percent.
The findings also showed that search engines continue to be the main way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. In their share of traffic coming directly from search engines, Automotive, Business and Finance, Entertainment, News and Media, Online Video and Sports categories showed double-digit increases last month compared with September of last year.