Among the top three search engines, Google’s upstream Web traffic grew for the automotive, shopping and travel categories, according to Experian Hitwise, an online intelligence service.
Google also 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.
Google is greatest source of traffic to key U.S. industries
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.
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.
