Bing-powered search made small gains in U.S. market share during October, according to the latest Hitwise numbers.

Bing gained 3% between September and October, going from 12.8% market share to 13.23%, while Yahoo also rose slightly from 15.27% to 15.39%. Combined, that boosted Bing-powered share among major search engines to 28.62% … still a far cry from Google’s estimated 65.38% of the US search market.

Meanwhile, more interesting to me is Hitwise’s take on search query lengths. In the same news release today, Hitwise estimates that 27.23% of searches were one word long in October. That number is up from 26.45% in September. Hitwise tells me this is desktop searches only — mobile search is not included. (Mobile is where you’d expect shorter queries to be more prevalent.)

Not much of a month-to-month gain, but a little over a year ago, I wrote about query length on my own blog and shared a Hitwise chart that covered searches in September 2010. Notice that, at the time, Hitwise estimated one-word searches to be only 22.72% of all queries.

So, over 13 months, Hitwise is saying that one-word search queries have risen from 22.72% to 27.23%. There are a lot of implications in that for business owners and marketers — implications that are best left for a separate article, or for the comments below if you prefer.

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Search Behavior

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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