• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 14, 2011

What do search numbers released from comScore and Experian Hitwise this week tells us about the health of the industry? Both analyst firms tell a slightly different story about Google and Bing Yahoo for December 2010.

This year marketers can expect a healthier market and integration among several online channels. The industry will go through big changes in automation. It must to grow.

A quick look at comScore numbers via J.P. Morgan tells us Google's U.S. explicit core search market share rose sequentially from 66.2% to 66.6% in December. The Mountain View, Calif., company grew explicit core search volume by 13.1% in December, compared with the prior year-ago month. Monthly the numbers came in at 14.3 vs. 16.3 year on year growth in 3Q.

Microsoft site's for domestic explicit core search market share rose sequentially from 11.8% to 12.0% in December. The Redmond, Wash.-based company saw explicit core search volume fall to 29.4% year on year from 31.3%. In 4Q, explicit searches grew 33.7% year on year vs. 40.4% growth in 3Q.

Yahoo took a hit in December. U.S. explicit core search market share fell sequentially from 16.4% to 16.0% in December, but volume grew by 3.9% year on year, down from 4.1% Y/Y growth in November. In 4Q, explicit searches grew 4.9% year on year vs. 2.4% growth in 3Q.

Overall, U.S. explicit core search volume rose 12.1% year on year in December from 11.5% in November. In 4Q, total explicit search volume grew 13.4% year on year vs. 14.7% growth in 3Q.

Experian Hitwise show Google accounted for 69.67% of all U.S. searches for December 2010. Bing search received 25.77% of searches for the month, with Yahoo Search and Bing receiving 15.17% and 10.6%, respectively.

December proved a good month for Bing and Yahoo Search. On both search platforms, 81% of searches executed by searchers resulted in a visit to a Web site. Google's success rate rose 1% sequentially to 65%. Experian Hitwise suggests that the share of unsuccessful searches highlights the opportunity for both the search engines and marketers to evaluate the search engine result pages to ensure that searchers are finding the information they are seeking.

Google reports 2010 Q4 earnings on Jan. 20. Yahoo reports on Jan. 25. Microsoft reports fiscal year 2011 Q2 on Jan. 27.

Interestingly, shorter search queries averaging one-to-four words long rose 1% from November 2010 to December 2010. Two-word searches comprised the majority, amounting for 24.26% of all queries.