Hitwise: Bing-powered Search Share Inches Up; One-Word Queries Also Rising

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.