14 DAY TRIAL // The search market numbers for March are starting to come in and Experian Hitwise is the first to deliver. The overall picture is hardly surprising, but there are quite a few interesting trends, to say the least. According to the report, Google lost market share, Bing's slow growth stopped, this while Ask and Yahoo saw a rise in searches in the US.
"Google accounted for 69.97 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending March 27, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask received 15.04 percent, 9.62 percent and 3.44 percent, respectively. The remaining 69 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.93 percent of U.S. searches," Hitwise said in the press release.
In all fairness, the changes in market share are pretty insignificant, small enough to attribute them to the inherent error margin of this type of reports. Google lost just one percent of its market share, dropping from 70.95 percent to 69.97 percent. Bing searches also declined by one percent, going from 9.70 percent to 9.62 percent.
On the other hand, Yahoo's share grew from 14.57 percent to 15.04 percent, a three-percent increase. Ask saw a much bigger rise, compared to its market share, growing from 2.84 percent to 3.44 percent, a 21-percent increase.
Bing is doing much better when it comes to vertical searches, its specialized search engines are sending a lot more traffic upstream. The Automotive, Health and Shopping search engines are sending twice as much traffic as they did just a year ago and the Travel search engine also saw an 85-percent increase. Of course, you should probably wait for other search market reports to come in as different firms tend to come up with varying numbers and sometimes even opposing trends.