Google accounted for 71.65 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending June 26, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask received 14.37 percent, 9.85 percent and 2.19 percent, respectively, according to Experian Hitwise research. The remaining 70 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.94 percent of U.S. searches.



Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing May 2010 with June 2010, Automotive, Business and Finance, Entertainment, News and Media, Shopping and Social Networking categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines, the research firm said.

Among the top three search engines, Google delivered the most visits to the four categories below year over year. Google's percentage of upstream traffic grew for the Automotive, Shopping and Travel categories. Yahoo! Search saw gains in the Automotive and Shopping categories. Bing saw triple-digit growth in three categories - Automotive, Shopping and Travel - including a 199 percent increase in the Shopping category.

Longer search queries - those averaging five to eight words long - increased 1 percent from May 2010 to June 2010. Two-word searches comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 23.42 percent of all queries. Four- to seven-word searches all increased 1 percent. Shorter search queries - one to four words - were flat from May 2010 to June 2010.