Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

Google search share rises while competitors stumble

By | October 12, 2011, 1:48pm PDT

Summary: Google continues to go up in the search market share while its competitors falter.

Although Google might be having problems understanding social networking and platforms in general, apparently it can still understand its core business: search.

The Goog accounted for 66.12 percent of all searches in the United States in the month of September, according to research firm Experian Hitwise.

In fact, Google was the only top search engine that did not falter when it came to month-over-month percentage change. Bing and Bing-powered searches dropped three and two percent respectively, while Yahoo slipped by the most at four percent.

Hitwise reported that Google actually usually sees an increase in the month of September based on the last five out of six years, although reasons for that weren’t explained, so maybe Google doesn’t deserve so much praise if this was expected.

Here are a few other highlights from September searches:

  • Yahoo has typically seen a search decline in September vs. August per Experian Hitwise data and has for the last 5 years.
  • One-word searches comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 25.32 percent of all queries in September 2011.
  • Longer search queries of eight or more words increased by three percent in September 2011.

We’ll see how well Google does when it comes to even more important numbers — earnings — on Thursday when the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech giant reports third quarter results.

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Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.

Disclosure

Rachel King

Rachel King has no business relationships, affiliations, investments, or other potential conflicts of interest relating to the content posted in this blog.

Biography

Rachel King

Rachel King is a staff writer for CBS Interactive in San Francisco. Before serving as a contributing editor at ZDNet in New York City for two years, she previously worked for The Business Insider, FastCompany.com, CNN's San Francisco bureau and the U.S. Department of State. Rachel has also written for MainStreet.com, Irish America Magazine and the New York Daily News, among others. Rachel has a B.A. in Mass Communications and History from the University of California, Berkeley and a M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University, where she served as art director for the student magazine, Plated.

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