A recent survey carried out by Internet metrics firm Hitwise has revealed that Google has increased its search engine market share to 64 percent even as the other three major search engines lost ground.
Hitwise said that around 64.1 percent of the search queries in the US were asked on Google, thereby increasing its market share from 63.9 percent in February. Hitwise said that it tracked the surfing habits of over 10 million American Internet users.
All the three other major players in search engine market lost their ground. Yahoo search engine queries dropped by around 0.2 percent to 21.3 percent while Microsoft's strenuous efforts to grab a larger slice of the market through its new operating system failed, with the number of queries on MSN Search down to 9.2 percent from 9.3 percent in February. Ask.com held around 3 percent of the search market.
In the report Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise said that Google's popularity showed no signs of abating. "Google's growth shows no signs of slowing. 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", he said.
Specifically, the Hitwise survey revealed that over 28 percent of traffic for health-related sites and around 19 percent of the traffic for travel sites was from Google. A separate survey carried out by online measurement firm comScore Networks attributes over 65.7 percent of the Web search market to Google.
