While Bing is happily rolling out new search features, Microsoft can also smile at the latest search engine market share report from Experian Hitwise.

Google is still light years ahead of Yahoo, Bing, and Ask … but Experian Hitwise shows Bing with a 7% increase during October, while both Google and Yahoo saw small drops in search share.

Experian Hitwise also updates some stats related to search queries:

“Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, increased 3 percent between October and September 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 4 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries – those averaging one to four words long – decreased 1 percent from month to month.”

Postscript: Enquisite has published its own research on search engine referral data. It shows Google even further ahead of Yahoo, Bing, et al. But this chart tracks click thrus from each search engine, not the number of searches done.

We received some interesting data from search agency iCrossing yesterday. The data show US search market share percentages and distribution quite different than the major traffic metrics firms. The company says its numbers are “based on a large representative sample of Fortune 1000 companies, across all major verticals,” which use its search tracking tools.

Accordingly the iCrossing data show US September natural search market share to be the following:

• Google 76.7 percent
• Bing (increasingly slightly from Aug to) 8.2 percent
• Yahoo (decreasing to) 11.1 percent
• AOL and Ask show “precipitous declines”

This is how iCrossing characterized the data in an email to me: “it represents actual traffic received from engines, as picked up by our own analytics tracking across enterprise level sites, as opposed to all traffic on the Web.”

Compare comScore data for September:

Compare Hitwise:

The Bing numbers are relatively close in the data above but iCrossing shows Yahoo with a significantly smaller share than either comScore or Hitwise. And while those services both seem to show a stable core of usage for Ask and AOL search, iCrossing reflects losses for those engines.

Here are some visual representations of the iCrossing numbers:

Google accounted for more than 71% of US searches in September, according to the latest Hitwise survey.

While Google’s market share continues to rise slowly, both Yahoo and Bing lost ground in September — down 3% and 5%, respectively.

In a detailed report about the Canadian search landscape, Hitwise says Bing is the best search engine at producing “successful searches,” beating out both Google and Yahoo, as well as their Canada-specific search engines.

The chart above, provided specifically to Search Engine Land, shows that Bing is the 6th most popular search engine in Canada, but has the best success rate at 78.61%. That’s about 2% better than Yahoo Canada (ca.search.yahoo.com), and more than 6% better than Google Canada (www.google.ca).

It’s important to understand how Hitwise defines a “successful search”:

“A successful search is defined as one where the consumer leaves the search engine after performing a search.”

You could make the argument that some searches are successful even if the user doesn’t leave the search engine, especially considering the availability of search shortcuts and “instant answers” that sometimes show up on a search results page. But without knowing how many queries lead to shortcuts and answers, there’s no way to gauge their impact on these Hitwise numbers. Plus, it’s quite possible that searchers still leave the search engine even when a shortcut appears, which would further minimize their impact on the definition of a successful search.

Overall, Hitwise says an average of 70% of searches across all search engines in Canada were successful in the 12 weeks leading up to June 27, 2009. As you’d expect, though, when Canadian searchers add a geographic modifier to a query — such as “wedding dresses canada” instead of just “wedding dresses” — the percent of successful searches goes way up.

Oddly, though, Canadian searchers seem to lag behind U.S. searchers when it comes to the complexity of their search queries. Hitwise says more than half of Canadian search terms contain only one or two words.

The chart above shows that Canadian searchers use one- or two-word queries 51% of the time. That’s less than UK searchers, where the number is close to 60%, and more than the U.S., where 43% of searches had only one or two words.

Other interesting pieces of data from the Hitwise Canada Search Report:

• When you combine the .com, .ca, and other domains, Google powers 80% of searches in Canada. MSN is second with 9% (combining Bing and Live.com), and Yahoo third with 8%.
• The top 17 search terms used in those four weeks leading up to June 27th were all navigational — searchers looking for specific web sites like Facebook and YouTube.
• Canadians are bigtime gamers. The top non-navigational English search term was “games” and the top French search term was “jeux,” which also means “games.”
• Search engines are the largest traffic source for web sites in Canada: 33% of all web site visits in June came from a search engine.

Back to the headline of this article … it’s worth remembering Greg Sterling’s article yesterday about how U.S. searchers say Google is the best search engine. The Hitwise data reported here isn’t based on a consumer survey, but on measuring searcher behavior. You can’t help but wonder what Canadian searchers would say if they were surveyed about search satisfaction. Would the results match what we’re reporting here?

A report analyzing traffic and click-through rates from ad network Chikita finds that “Bing users are over 50% more likely to click an ad on your site than Google users.” What this means, according to the post, is those who arrive at third party sites via Bing click more frequently on ads on those sites than those coming through Google. TechCrunch offers a bit more detail and speculation about why this might be (i.e., “the law of large numbers”). According to Chikita, the respective click rates are:

• Google: .97 percent
• Yahoo: 1.24 percent
• Bing: 1.5 percent

Bing appears has made some incremental gains in search market share since its launch at the end of May. The two most recent roundups of the numbers are here and here. Even though Bing has been well received and has some momentum it doesn’t appear that will quickly translate into significant market share advances. For that reason Microsoft still needs Yahoo’s reach.

Turning to the seemingly perpetual subject of a search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, AdAge is reporting that a deal, previously described as “imminent,” could be announced this week. The article says the payment structure was a sticking point and will be a revenue share rather than an upfront payment and revenue guarantees, which Yahoo had reportedly wanted:

Execs in Redmond never conceived of the deal as an upfront purchase of Yahoo’s search traffic but as a deal in which Yahoo would be compensated from a share of revenue from the sale of search ads. Yahoo would be allowed to sell search ads on Bing.com as well as its own site, giving it more search inventory to sell and making it a bigger player in the search sales front. It would also immediately be able to save millions by not having to maintain its own search infrastructure.

The latest terms of the deal underscore Microsoft’s devotion to developing and owning technology vs. selling media. The deal won’t make it a bigger seller of online advertising but it would allow it to eliminate a search-technology competitor in Yahoo and consolidate roughly 30% of the search marketplace on its own platform — a large enough share, CEO Steve Ballmer seems to believe, to dent Google’s dominance.

If the article is correct then Yahoo would retain the ability to sell search and display to its advertisers, but probably not through an integrated platform. Currently Yahoo sells search via Panama and display advertising through APT; however there was always discussion of integrating the platforms in the near term.

We’ll have to wait to see whether there’s a deal and what the terms are. Any such deal would have to pass muster with regulators before it could be implemented.

On that front, the NY Times ran an article this weekend describing internal conflict within the Obama administration about how aggressive to get with anti-trust policy and prosecutions. The US Department of Justice anti-trust chief Christine Varney, who has described Google previously as “a monopoly,” is apparently facing push-back in her quest to reign in some US corporations. How this internal debate plays out will affect scrutiny of potential deals such as Yahoo-Microsoft.

Just in from Hitwise, the first month-to-month figures since the launch of Bing. And the figures show Bing has both gained and dropped in the same month. Confusing? Yes it is!

Here are the month-to-month figures, percentage of searches each search engine handled in the United States:

You can see that from May to June, Google’s up to 74.04%. Yahoo’s up, to 16.19%. And Bing? Down! It dropped from 5.64% in May to 5.25% in June.

Despite this, Hitwise put out its emailed release saying “Bing Growing at 25 Percent Rate in June 2009.” How’s that work? Let’s go to the second chart, week-by-week growth in May:

Here you can see that in the beginning of the month, Bing had a 4.3% share. By the end, it had risen to 6.71% share. Over the month, Hitwise says this is a 25% gain.

The question is, will Bing maintain that type of share through an entire month? We’ll know when July figures come out. The bigger question is whether Bing will maintain that type of share when Microsoft’s ad spending ramps down.

Meanwhile, over at Mashable, there’s been plenty of buzz over the fact that Bing is “now” bigger than Digg, Twitter or CNN. That lacks the proper perspective. Look at this chart:

That shows Live.com having more traffic than two of those players (and yes, it also has more than CNN, too). Live.com was Bing. IE, “Bing” has always been bigger than those other players, it seems.

For some more prespective on the early numbers, see my past post, Bing: comScore sees Gains; Compete Sees Same Old, Same Old

Yahoo News was the web’s number one choice last week for information about the death of entertainer Michael Jackson. In a post on the Hitwise blog, Heather Dougherty shows a chart detailing how the major online News & Media sites fared:

Late last week I wrote about how each of the major search engines handled the extraordinary search activity that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett on the same day. Yahoo is in a unique situation as an actual content provider with writers and editors, and some of those staffers were called in from home to help Yahoo cover the breaking news. The chart above suggests the effort was worth it.

But perhaps the big winner on the day was TMZ, the entertainment site that first broke the news of Jackson’s death. Hitwise says TMZ traffic hit a three-year high on Thursday, with 5x more visits than the day before.

More early stats are coming in on how searchers are reacting to the Bing launch. comScore shows Microsoft’s Bing search engine continuing to make gains, but Compete shows things remain largely the same.

From comScore, the latest stats show that “searcher penetration” has climbed from 13.7% in the week before it launched, to 15.8% during the launch week to 16.7% for the week after launch. The share of search results pages have risen from 9.1% to 12.1% over the same period. From the comScore press release:

Searcher Penetration & Share Of Search Results Pages shouldn’t be confused with the standard “search share” figures that comScore or other ratings services typically release. As I wrote earlier when these figures first came out:

I’ve talked with comScore a bit more about the figures. They’re not providing an early look at the usual “share of searches” figure that’s released on a monthly basis, as this is something they want clients to have a first look at.

The “Share Of Search Results Pages” figure above runs closely akin to that, they say – so Microsoft’s Bing might have picked up 2% share of the searches “pie.” However, keep in mind that if the pie itself gets larger because of new searches, other players can lose share even if the overall raw number of searches increases.

To me, the more interesting figure is the “Searcher Penetration,” which shows of everyone searching on the web, what percentage at some point made it to a particular search engine on a daily basis. Microsoft managed to get 15.5% of searchers over to check it out, up from 13.8% the week before – a 1.7% gain. comScore tells me that Google and Yahoo also had penetration gains, but that Microsoft’s gain was on the order of double of the others.

And how could everyone gain? Penetration for any particular search engine can be up to 100%, as people use more than one search engine. So (purely for example) Google could have a 80% penetration, Yahoo 60% and Microsoft 30% — which would show most people use Google, but plenty also use Yahoo and some use also Microsoft.

Meanwhile, Compete has also sent me stats. Below, “Search Engine Users Share,” the percentage of all searchers in the United States who went to one or more of the services below (since they could go to more than one, the overall percentages add to more than 100%):

The bold line marks the Bing launch, and you can see Microsoft immediately gains 3% — but this doesn’t come at the expense of the other search engines. People were checking out Bing in addition to visiting their regular services. Since the launch, Bing’s had a high of 12.1% share (also in bold) but mainly hovers at the 11% mark.

Unlike comScore, Compete has release standard share of searches figures. These are below. The show what percentage of searches are handled by each of the major search engines. While people may search at more than one search engine, the overall “pie” of searches that happen on a given day is finite — so the percentages do not add up to more than 100%. Bold marks the launch day for Bing (figures before that reflect searches at MSN and Windows Live):

As you can see, Compete’s figures show that the launch has created no gain in search share. Compete has some additional charts through June 8 here.

Over at Hitwise, there aren’t share figures in terms of search, but you can see how Bing is now among the top 20 most popular web sites in the US and is considered the 4th most popular search engine. Of course, I think Live Search (which Bing replaced) was also among the most popular sites — and I’m pretty sure it was the 3rd most popular search engine. So the changes don’t mean that much when you know the context. And does that mean Bing is less popular than Live Search? Almost certainly not. I suspect there’s still a lot of data consolidation that has yet to happen with the Hitwise figures.

Meanwhile, Efficient Frontier — which handles paid search campaigns for many large companies — found a 19.8% lift in impressions for Bing. That’s not a 19.8% share. That’s the difference between the percentage who visited Bing before the launch compared to afterward. What the actual impression share was isn’t given.

These figures are all prelminary, and while we’re all anxious to know how things are going, it’s going to take months to really assess the situation.

The first true benchmark will be the more standard figures for June and especially the months after that. A rise in June wouldn’t be surprising, given the amount of marketing that’s going on. But when the marketing levels off or decreases in the following months, will it have done the job to keep searchers.

But before we get June, May figures are coming in. From Nielsen (PDF), the share of searches handled in the US by the major three players:

• Google: 63.2%
• Yahoo: 17.2%
• Microsoft: 9.4%

As for comScore, financial analysts get stats before the general press, and sometimes those leak out. For May, Business Insider has figures from comScore that JP Morgan’s Imran Khan put out:

• Google: 65.0%
• Yahoo: 20.1%
• Microsoft: 8.0%

For a long term view of search share, see my Search Market Share 2008: Google Grew, Yahoo & Microsoft Dropped & Stabilized post. Also see related discussion on Techmeme.

Following up on last week’s post on Bing vs. Yahoo traffic, comes new data from Robin Goad, Hitwise research director in the UK. If it weren’t the middle of the night there, I’d try and speak to him about it.

Goad offers a range of observations and datapoints about how people are using Bing vs. Google. He explains the patterns and queries are similar (lots of navigational and branded terms). But what caught my eye, and potentially significant for Bing, was the following statement:

[O]ne positive sign is that average visit time has increased to eight and a half minutes. This is half of Google UK’s number but only slightly below Yahoo! UK Search, implying that the people are actually spending time on the site and using it rather than just visiting out of curiosity.

He also says later in the post:

However, the downstream data also paints a positive picture for Bing, as last week its top downstream site was MSN UK. Looking at the upstream data, it is also clear that Bing relied on other Microsoft properties for most of its traffic: 45.8% came from MSN UK, with a further 16.6% from Windows Live Mail (Hotmail).

Briefly last week Bing became the number two engine in the UK, to later fall back behind Yahoo.

We saw the same headline, based on data issued by StatCounter from Thursday. These data reportedly show that yesterday the share of searches went like this:

• Google: 71.47 percent
• Bing: 16.28 percent
• Yahoo: 10.22 percent

On a global basis the company said it saw a similar trend:

• Google: 87.62 percent
• Bing: 5.62 percent
• Yahoo: 5.13 percent

To get a reality check on these numbers and discover whether Bing had in fact surpassed Yahoo we reached out to Hitwise, Nielsen, comScore and Compete. We’re still waiting to get data or updates from these sources. But the charts and tables below reflect what we got quickly from Hitwise and Nielsen. I also include some public Compete data at the end.

Hitwise shows Yahoo still more than double Bing’s volume, but says that Bing’s visits “are up more than 14,500% since launch.”

Nielsen shows a jump in Bing visits on June 1 but a decline thereafter. But look how the volume doubled in terms of audience (vs. Live Search) and how page views essentially tripled.

The blue numbers are based on small samples and are less reliable.

Now here are the Compete public data comparing Google, Yahoo search (not Yahoo.com) and Bing (where the sample is too small to be helpful).

What these data collectively show — and we’ll update if/when we get more — is that Bing has received a potentially significant traffic bump compared to Live Search/MSN since launch and rollout of the marketing campaign on TV and online. However Bing has (so far) not surpassed Yahoo for the number two spot.

Update: Below is a more complete chart from Hitwise showing daily visits, with Live and MSN broken out. The chart appears to reflect that Bing has taken over for MSN and Live Search but that it has not gained any significant share according to Hitwise: