Jan 14, 2010 at 2:45pm ET by Matt McGee

Google surpassed 72% U.S. market share in December according to the latest numbers from Experian Hitwise. For Google, that represents a slight gain over November's share of all U.S. searches. Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com all saw their search share drop from November to December. In a separate blog post, Hitwise's Bill Tancer says Bing's search "success rate" is on the rise -- from about 70% in October to 75% now. In the chart below, Yahoo is the yellow line, Google is purple, and Bing is green. Hitwise defines "success rate" as "the percentage of executed searches that result in a vi [...]

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

Hitwise: Facebook (Sort Of) More Visited Than Google On Christmas

Dec 29, 2009 at 4:42pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Hitwise tweeted this morning that Facebook reached the number one most visited site in the US for the first time ever over the Christmas holiday, pushing past Google. But digging a little deeper, that might not be so. It all depends on what you consider "Google" to be. From the tweet: Facebook was the most visited site in the US on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 1st time the site has been the #1 visited US site ever. We followed up to get some actual numbers and go beyond this 140 character tidbit. Hitwise kindly responded, telling us: On Christmas Eve, December 24th, Facebook had 7 [...]

Yahoo Top News Site, Google Second; People Spending More Time With Fewer Sites

Dec 24, 2009 at 11:22am ET by Greg Sterling

According to November comScore data (published by TechCrunch) Google News is the second largest online news property in the world in terms of traffic. Yahoo ranks as the top global news site. Here's the partial comScore list: Yahoo News Google News New York Times sites CNN China’s QQ.com BBC MSN In the US Yahoo still ranks as number one but Google News reportedly falls down the list below the traditional news domains, such as NY Times and CNN. However, over at Nielsen (via Editor & Publisher) the numbers appear to be quite different than the comScore data above -- espe [...]

Hitwise: Google Near 72% Of All US Searches

Dec 9, 2009 at 2:27pm ET by Matt McGee

Google is approaching a 72% market share of searches in the U.S. according to the latest release from Experian Hitwise. The November 2009 stats show Google getting 71.57% of all U.S. searches, up almost a full percent from October. Yahoo and Bing both fell month-to-month, while Ask.com gained one percent. [...]

Bing Gains Search Share In October: Experian Hitwise

Nov 11, 2009 at 2:42pm ET by Matt McGee

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 inc [...]

iCrossing: Google’s Share Of Search Almost 77 Percent

Oct 27, 2009 at 8:00am ET by Greg Sterling

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 "pre [...]

Google Passes 71% Market Share In Latest Hitwise Survey

Oct 7, 2009 at 12:33am ET by Matt McGee

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. [...]

Best Search Engine In Canada? Hitwise Says It’s Bing

Aug 19, 2009 at 11:26pm ET by Matt McGee

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 [...]

Reports: Bing Users Click More, Search Deal With Yahoo Coming This Week

Jul 27, 2009 at 10:14am ET by Greg Sterling

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 [...]

Hitwise: Bing Both Grows & Drops In June; Google Still Tops

Jul 9, 2009 at 3:17pm ET by Danny Sullivan

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-b [...]

Yahoo News Was Top Destination For Michael Jackson News

Jun 30, 2009 at 3:55am ET by Matt McGee

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 break [...]

Bing: comScore sees Gains; Compete Sees Same Old, Same Old

Jun 17, 2009 at 12:49pm ET by Danny Sullivan

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: Work Week 5/25/09-5/29/09 6/1/09-6/5/09 6/8/09-6/12/09 Searcher [...]

Hitwise UK: “People Actually Using Bing”

Jun 8, 2009 at 6:24pm ET by Greg Sterling

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 Goog [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Microsoft: Bing | Stats: Hitwise

Did Bing Leapfrog Yahoo? Not Exactly

Jun 5, 2009 at 3:42pm ET by Greg Sterling

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 [...]

Hitwise: Natural Search Referrals On The Rise

May 18, 2009 at 1:55pm ET by Matt McGee

As a followup to last week's report that fewer searchers are clicking on paid ads, Hitwise has released a follow-up report showing that organic search referrals are on the rise. "For the majority of categories measured at Hitwise, search is the top source of traffic referrals and the share has increased year-over-year," writes Heather Dougherty. According to the Hitwise chart below, only three of 15 categories saw fewer natural search referrals in April 2009 than they did in April 2008 -- Government, Community, and News & Media. The yellow-highlighted categories are ones that Hit [...]

Hitwise: Less Searchers Clicking On Search Ads?

May 13, 2009 at 11:47am ET by Barry Schwartz

Paid Search Traffic Share Down 26% from Hitwise reports that paid traffic from search engines is declining. Hitwise's data said "in the four weeks to May 9, 2009, 7.25% of search engine traffic to All Categories of websites was from paid clicks. This compares to 9.84% in the same four week period in 2008 - representing a 26% decline in the share of paid clicks." It is important to note that search referrals overall are still climbing. However, most of that is due to the growth of people clicking on the organic/free listings and less and less on the paid listings. The chart below shows [...]

Gmail, Google Maps Among Fastest-Rising Google Properties

Apr 21, 2009 at 7:24am ET by Matt McGee

Gmail and Google Maps are two of Google's hottest properties, while YouTube and Google Image Search are falling on the list of the most popular Google properties. That's according to Hitwise data that tracked U.S. visits to Google sites during the month of March: Gmail is the big winner here, surpassing YouTube as the number two Google property -- something Greg reported last month. Google Maps is also on the rise, perhaps spurred recently by the dislay of Google Maps listings on non-local queries. To put this in perspective, we can turn back the clock to early 2008, when Hitwise sho [...]

News Media Bites The Search That Feeds It: Hitwise Data

Apr 9, 2009 at 1:35am ET by Matt McGee

This week's battle royale has pitted newspapers and traditional media against Google and online news. If you somehow missed it, the CliffsNotes version is that traditional media (Associated Press, newspapers, etc.) are accusing Internet sites (search engines, news aggregators, etc.) of diverting traffic that should be going to news web sites, profiting off news content in violation of copyright law, and essentially sending newspapers into the financial crisis that many are in today. Amidst all the claims and accusations, Danny took the AP and newspapers out to the woodshed and pointed out w [...]

Hitwise: Google’s Lead Growing, Searches Getting Longer

Apr 8, 2009 at 4:10pm ET by Matt McGee

Google's share of the U.S. search market continues to grow according to Hitwise data released today. (PDF download) Google's market share rose from 72.11% in February to 72.39% in March, while both Yahoo and Live Search saw declines. Year-over-year numbers are also in Google's favor: It's up 8% over March 2008, while Yahoo and Live Search are down 19% and 17%, respectively. For what it's worth, Ask.com shows an 8% increase between February and March. Meanwhile, search queries continue to get longer. As we reported a couple months ago with data for January, searches of four words a [...]

Paris Hilton Is Top Twitter Search Celebrity

Apr 8, 2009 at 2:15pm ET by Matt McGee

I'm filing this one under "I don't get it" -- according to new Hitwise data, Paris Hilton is the most-searched celebrity on Twitter. Do that many people really want to find Paris Hilton? And follow her? The data covers searches done at search.twitter.com during the week that ended on March 21, 2009. Searches for the Twilight vampire series held down the No. 1 spot, no doubt due to the release of the DVD during the week these stats represent. A conservative political hashtag, "redco," was No. 2, and "parkersburg" -- the West Virginia city, perhaps? -- was third. And then there's Paris [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Search Behavior | Twitter

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