Google accounted for 72.74% of all US searches conducted in the four weeks ending April 25, 2009, according to search-engine share data from Hitwise (via MarketingCharts).

This share is up 7% from 67.93% last April, and up from 72.39% in March 2009.

During the same period in April, Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com received 16.27%, 5.68% and 3.95% of searches, respectively. The remaining 49 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.36% of US searches.

Finding Industry Categories

Search engines continue to be the primary way internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing April 2009 with April 2008, Business and Finance, Sports and Online Video categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines:

Query Length Continues to Rise

Hitwise also reported that longer search queries continue to grow in popularity and have increased over the past year. Search queries of five to more than eight words in length have increased 7% between April 2008 and April 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 18%. The same time period showed that shorter search queries - those averaging one to four words long - have decreased 2%:

Searches of two words comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 22.95% of all queries.