According to the latest figures from Hitwise, Google continues its dominance of the US search market, accounting for 64% of searches in October. The search engine has increased its market share by 6% year on year.
Yahoo was next with 21.6% of the search market, down slightly on the same period last year. MSN Live Search was third on 7% of searches (down by around 3%), while Ask.com had a 4% share.
The remaining 49 search engines in Hitwise’s figures accounted for 1.68% of U.S. searches between them.
Hitwise also looked at the amount of traffic sent to various website categories from search engines.
Health and medical websites relied on search engines more then any other category. With search accounting for around 45% of their traffic, with 29% of that traffic coming directly from Google.
Travel websites were next, relying on search for 32.5% of traffic, while 25% of traffic in the shopping/classifieds category was brought in by search.
The Travel, Entertainment and Business and Finance categories all experienced double digit increases in the share of traffic from search engines.
Nielsen/NetRatings data for October also demonstrates Google’s dominance – 120m web users visited a Google website last month, ahead of 119m for Microsoft and 110m for Yahoo.
