According to Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, Google accounted for 64 percent of all US searches for the four weeks ending March 31, 2007. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 22, 9 and 3 percent respectively. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 5 percent of U.S. searches.
"Google's growth shows no signs of slowing" said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. "Despite capturing the majority of searches in the U.S., and in light of competitor’s improvements, Google’s market share of executed searches continues to grow, exceeding 10 percent growth year-over-year.”
Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing March 2007 to March 2006, Travel, News and Media, and Business and Finance categories were the top three searches and received more than double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines as outlined below:
1. Health and Medical are thrieving and accounted for 43.27% of searches during March 2007 with an annual growth rate of 9.76%
2. Travel is gaining ground accounting for 30.79% of searches during March 2007 with an impressive annual growth rate of 24.95%
3. Shopping and Classifieds are showing well at 25.35% of searches during Marh 2007 achieving an annual groth rate of 14.24%
For up to date analysis of online trends and statistics, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence Analyst Weblogs at weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.