Oct 11, 2010 13:38 GMT  ·  By

Google continues to dominate the search landscape in September, according to the latest data from Hitwise, but Yahoo and Bing still hold a sizeable chunk. However, it looks like the two search engines put together have actually lost a little market share last month.

"Google accounted for 72.15 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 2, 2010," Hitwise said.

"Bing powered search received 23.64 percent of searches for the month with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 13.54 percent and 10.10 percent, respectively. The remaining 65 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 4.22 percent of U.S. searches," it added.

Google saw a minor bump in market share going from 71.59 percent to 72.15 percent. Of course, such a minor change can be attributed any number of factors, including the inherent error margins of these types of studies, so it may not be an indication of a larger trend.

At the same time, searches on Bing and Yahoo, also powered by Bing in the US, saw a small decrease in volume from 24.15 percent to 23.64 percent, a two percent drop. Again, the drop is fairly small and should not be seen as a trend.

It must be noted that September is the first full month in which Yahoo search results have been provided by Bing in the US.

Separately, Bing actually got an increase in traffic in September going from 9.87 percent to 10.10 percent, 2 percent rise. Yahoo on the other hand lost 5 percent of its market share, going from 14.28 percent to 13.54 percent.

Note that Hitwise doesn't count the searches for the entire month, rather four-week rolling periods ending September 25 and October 2. Hitwise gets its data from about 10 million US internet users.