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:

According to the latest comScore survey, Google’s search market share climbed to just under 65% last month, and remains more than triple that of Yahoo, the second-place search engine.

ComScore pegs Google with 64.9% of all searches conducted during September 2009, up from 64.6% in August. Yahoo dropped from August’s 19.3% to 18.8% in September. And Bing, in third place, showed minor growth from 9.3% to 9.4%.

Despite Google’s small gains in market share, comScore says Google saw a slight drop in the number of searches — but that could be due to September having one less day than August.

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.

Since it’s launch Bing has steadily been inching up in market share, conveying the impression that Google has a bona fide competitor on its hands. Yesterday, however, data from NetApplications and StatCounter reflect that Bing may have seen its first usage declines since the engine’s launch several months ago.

Before getting too excited one way or another, we must be cautious. There are monthly upticks and downturns. Before drawing any broader conclusions we’d need to see this confirmed by comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Compete — in other words, a consensus view — and then we’d need to look at the trend over a period of time.

Source: StatCounter

There are more feature enhancements and releases in the pipeline for Bing. And I know that Microsoft believes it’s only just begun with the search engine. There’s also the Yahoo deal, which still must be approved but which more than double’s Bing’s advertiser’s reach. And there’s also mobile, which is heating up.

But if it turned out that Bing’s growth had in fact stalled it would be a kind of “what now?” moment for Microsoft.

No one reading Search Engine Land should be surprised to hear stories about Google’s dominance of the search landscape. But the degree to which Google dominates in some areas is sure to make you raise an eyebrow.

Consider India and Brazil, two growing Internet markets. ComScore released some stunning numbers about what’s happening in those two countries and how Google owns a lot of the online experience there.

In Brazil, for example, about 30% of a person’s online time is spent on a Google property. In India, it’s about 29% of online time. For perspective, comScore says that the worldwide average amount of time spent on Google properties is 9.4%.

Google accounts for almost 90% of searches conducted in Brazil, and 88% in India, comScore says. But it’s not just Google’s search engine powering this dominance. Consider these numbers:

India

• Social networking: Google’s Orkut gets 68% of time spent in this category
• Multimedia: YouTube gets 83% of time spent
• Maps: Google Maps has 64% of time spent

Brazil

• Social networking: Orkut gets 96% of time spent
• Multimedia: YouTube gets 92% of time spent
• Maps: Google Maps gets 71% of time spent

ComScore suggests that Google’s dominance in these two countries is because their emergence on the world scene coincided with Google’s rise online. Perhaps. But one thing’s for sure: It’s Google’s world, and we’re all just living in it.

The latest search engine stats from Nielsen bring good news for Bing, which now has more than 10% market share for the first time in … well, longer than I can remember.

Nielsen says Bing captured 10.7% of all searches in August, up from 9.0% in July. Based on that jump, Nielsen says Bing is the fastest growing search provide in its Top 10. Google remains a distant number one with almost 65% market share in Nielsen’s survey. Nielsen’s numbers are included below.

Top 10 Search Providers for August 2009, Ranked by Searches (U.S.)
+------------------------------+-------------+----------+------------+
| Provider                     |  Searches   | M-O-M %  |  Share of  |
|                              |    (000)    |  Growth  |  Searches  |
+------------------------------+-------------+----------+------------+
| Total                        | 10,812,734  |   2.9%   |   100.0%   |
| Google Search                |  6,986,580  |   2.6%   |   64.6%    |
| Yahoo! Search                |  1,726,060  |  -4.2%   |   16.0%    |
| MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search |  1,156,415  |  22.1%   |   10.7%    |
| AOL Search                   |   333,231   |   1.8%   |    3.1%    |
| Ask.com Search               |   186,270   |   2.9%   |    1.7%    |
| My Web Search                |   128,432   |   0.5%   |    1.2%    |
| Comcast Search               |   50,328    |  -21.6%  |    0.5%    |
| Yellow Pages Search          |   37,923    |   2.7%   |    0.4%    |
| NexTag Search                |   31,830    |   0.4%   |    0.3%    |
| Local.com Search             |   16,314    |   2.9%   |    0.2%    |
+------------------------------+-------------+----------+------------+
Source: Nielsen MegaView Search

Search activity around the world jumped 41 percent between July 2008 and July 2009, and Google remains the most popular search engine with 67.5% global market share. Those are some of the stats that comScore shared today about the global search market.

According to comScore, Google is not only No. 1 around the world, but it also continues to gain market share — rising 58% between July 2008 and July 2009. Yahoo is second in overall market share, but its growth is stagnant at just 2% in the same period. Chinese search engine Baidu is third overall, but Microsoft/Bing may eventually surpass it; the latter has seen a 41% increase in searches, while Baidu only grew by 8%.

It’s interesting to see that Ask Network saw almost as much growth (39%) as Microsoft sites. Among the top ten search properties worldwide, comScore says none is growing faster than Russia’s Yandex, which saw a 94% gain in searches over the past year.

The comScore release also includes some interesting stats comparing different world regions. comScore says Europe as a whole does the most searching, with 32.1% of all worldwide search activity. Asia Pacific is second with 30.8% and North America third with only 22.1% of all searches.

On an annual basis the University of Michigan puts out the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business report, sponsored and administered by Foresee Results. Among the things the index examines is consumer satisfaction with search engines.

The survey asks a representative sample of consumers to rate their experiences with portals and search engines according to several criteria, which produces an overall score on a 100 point scale. Google is again on top in search with a score of 86, identical to last year. The survey is supposed to be predictive of future consumer behavior, as the associated report argues:

[The ACSI] is a predictor of future success on both the micro and macro level. Google’s huge 10 point jump in satisfaction from 2007 to 2008 preceded a 7% increase in search market share from 2008 to 2009. Satisfaction with Yahoo, on the other hand, dropped 2.5% from 2007 to 2008, preceding a 17.5% decrease in search market share and a 5% drop in portal market share.

When the 2007 results saw Yahoo jump ahead of Google for the first time since the inception of the e-business survey I asked about this asserted relationship between the survey and market share:

The satisfaction data clearly don’t correlate with search market share. I asked [Foresee Results CEO Larry] Freed in this context why people should care and pay attention to the ACSI. Freed was confident that “search market share reflects past behavior. But the ACSI is predictive of future consumer behavior.” He said that historically it has been a very accurate gauge of future consumer behavior in other industries. He added that Google’s decline was a second dip in a row after a smaller decline last year.

Considered over the course of almost a decade of satisfaction rankings, the survey results would indeed appear predictive of market share (for Google), though the 2007 satisfaction win did not correctly predict corresponding market-share gains for Yahoo in 2007-2008.

Source: ACSI/Foresee Results (2009)

According to the survey, conducted before Bing, Google has a significant lead over its competitors, which has widened since 2007.

These overall results line up with a recent search loyalty report from comScore showing Google users as the most loyal.

It’s somewhat disappointing that we’ll have to wait an entire year to see what the ACSI has to say about Bing, because it would give us another opportunity to test the accuracy of the index as a predictor of future behavior.

According to comScore Bing now has an 8.9 percent share of the search market, up from 8 percent in May, before the launch. A year from now, when the next report comes out, we’ll know generally whether Bing is a success. For now, here’s what the ACSI report commentary has to say about Bing and its prospects:

[I]t seems unlikely that customers will actually leave Google in enough numbers to allow Bing to seriously challenge Google’s market dominance, given Google’s extremely high customer satisfaction. People are happy with Google, so why would they switch? They might switch if Bing is better, and that’s a tall order considering Google is the second- highest scoring ACSI service-sector company, behind Newegg.com. Bing has been called a search engine war “game changer,” but Google’s game will be very hard to change at this point. If anyone can do it, it’s the combined resources and market share of Yahoo and MSN.

The central “takeaway” from the report would seem to be that it’s not simply “habit” driving Google usage — people are actually “satisfied.”

Hitwise is reporting that Bing Shopping moved up to 4th place (from 8th) in the comparision shopping tools category last week, rising to 11% weekly market share. Combining the recent Double Cashback offer from retailers listed on Bing Shopping and the fortunate timing of the annual Back-to-School shopping rush has moved their weekly market share up from just 4% of visits prior to last week.

chart courtesy of Hitwise

Overall, Hitwise reports that visits to Bing Shopping have increased 169% since the week ending June 6th (the week of the official Bing Shopping launch) – Bing confirms an 3x increase in visits from internal data during the same timeframe.

Also in that same timeframe, Yahoo! Shopping, Bizrate and Shopzilla, currently the top 3 shopping comparision engines, each saw a drop of 2-5% in market share. Meanwhile, the only other shopping search engines in the top 10 to experience an increase were NexTag and Pronto.

Bing.com was responsible for sending 18.32% of visits, of those, 66.81% were new visitors (had not visited in last 30 days) and traffic from MSN accounted for another 11.34% of visits. Of last week’s visits to Bing Shopping, Google sent 5.86% and Yahoo! Search sent another 3.54% – an interesting number to watch change in the coming months as the integration of Bing and Yahoo moves forward.

For additional numbers and data on upstream / downstream traffic related to Bing Shopping, read Heather Dougherty’s post at Hitwise.