February was a strong month for Google – the number of searches to the site was up one percent to equal 66.44% (to be exact) of searches in the U.S. I believe this is a new high, because according to HitWise, Google reached their highest share of searches in December 2007 – at 65.98%.
Again Google takes the majority and the other search engines don’t come close. Yahoo! Search had almost 21% of searches, MSN Search got almost 7% (so if you could perfectly combine the two top competitors as Microsoft hopes, you’d be closer to 30%).
Ask.com had 4.16% of searches. As far as the long tail, it was really long – every other search engine (46 total) together accounted for just 1.87 percent of U.S. searches last month.
HitWise also looks at categories and compared February 2008 to February 2007. During the year searches to travel, entertainment, business and finance and sports categories had double digit increases in the percentage of traffic coming directly from search engines. Sports was the highest with 22% of searches coming from search engines.
The figures are based on a sample size of 10 million Internet users.















