Experian Hitwise: Bing Searches Up 5% In December 2010

According to the latest data from Hitwise, Bing had a very happy holiday season. From November to December 2010, Bing.com saw a 5% increase in search activity, while Bing powered searches also rose 2%, search activity on search.Yahoo.com remained the unchanged. Search activity on Google decreased from 70.10% in November to 69.67% in December 2010.

Notably, the Bing-Yahoo! Search Alliance also had higher click-through rates in December 2010, on both search engines, 81 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a website, compared to just 64.91% of searches on Google resulting in a visit to a website.

Comparison of November to December Searches

Search To Website Visit Comparison

Percentage of Searches Resulting in Website Click-Throughs

Small changes in length of search query were also reported, with  “Long Tail” queries dropping 4%, according to Hitwise:

Shorter search queries — those averaging one to four words long — increased 1 percent from November 2010 to December 2010. Two-word searches comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 24.26 percent of all queries. Longer search queries — five to eight words — were down 4 percent from November 2010 to December 2010.

Amazon.com was also a big winner during the holiday retail season, capturing the majority of traffic, or 12.03 percent, of all paid clicks to the top 500 retail sites for the four weeks ending Jan 1, 2011, an increase of 51%, over November 2010.

Visit Experian Hitwise to see the complete data report.