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.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Matt McGee

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.