New Data Confirms Solid Growth for Google Search in the US Last Month

Hot on the heels of comScore's search market numbers, Experian Hitwise is providing its own analysis. While the numbers differ, for a number of reasons, the overall trends are rather similar and both reports show Google growing in September in the US, after staying put for a long time.

Determining exactly how many people use one search engine to the detriment of others, while technically an exact science, takes quite a bit of guess-work as well. What's more, the 'market' itself varies from one source to the other.

This, and, of course, different methodologies and data sources, accounts for the discrepancies between the numbers so what's important here is to keep an eye on the trends.

"Google accounted for 66.12 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 1, 2011. The combined Bing-powered search comprised 28.07 percent of searches for the month, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 15.27 percent and 12.80 percent, respectively," Experian Hitwise announced.

"The remaining 66 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 5.81 percent of U.S. searches," it said.

Google added more than one percent points to its market share in the last month, a two percent growth.

It may not seem like much, but that's just because Google is so large already. Precisely because of its size though, jumps like this are somewhat rare.

And, while one percent point may not mean much to Google, it sure does to Bing and Yahoo, from whom Google took it.

Bing went from 13.10 percent to 12.80 percent of the US market in the last month, a two percent drop. Yahoo went from 15.89 percent to 15.27 percent, a four percent drop.

Bing and Yahoo put together lost almost one percent point, going from 28.99 percent of the market to 28.07 percent, a three percent drop.