Hitwise, Nielsen Online Release February Search Data
- March 11, 2009
Hitwise reported that longer search queries that average between five and more than eight words in length have increased 9% between February 2008 and 2009. During the same time, shorter search queries averaging one to four words long decreased 2%. Two-word searches comprised the majority of searches, averaging 23.47% of all queries.
Google accounted for 72.11% of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending Feb. 28, 2009, Hitwise said. Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com received 17.04%, 5.56% and 3.74%, respectively. The remaining 46 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.56% of U.S. searches.
Nielsen Online released top search providers, ranked by total searches in February 2009. An estimated 5.4 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search--up 19.2% from the prior year, representing 63.5% of all search queries conducted last month. Yahoo Search followed with 1.4 billion search queries--up 4%, representing 16.7% of all search queries. The losers were My Web Search, declining by 21.6% to 55,772; AT&T Worldnet Search, down 27.6%; and Dogpile.com Search, down 28.9% to 15,880.--Laurie Sullivan
