Search leader Google continued its record growth in market share of searches and is up 5 percent year-over-year in May, accounting for 68 percent of searches in the US and 87 percent of searches in the UK, according to the latest data from Hitwise, MarketingCharts writes.

Google accounted for 68.29 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ended May 31, followed by Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com with 19.95 percent, 5.89 percent and 4.23 percent respectively, Hitwise said.

The remaining 41 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.63 percent of US searches.

UK Search Market

In the UK market, Google search properties (Google.co.uk and Google.com) accounted for 87 percent of all UK searches in May - a 12 percent increase compared with May 2007.

Yahoo search properties accounted for 4.09 percent of UK searches in May, a 2 percent increase from the previous month.

MSN search properties accounted for 3.72 percent and Ask search properties accounted for 3.07 percent of searches. MSN increased 2 percent from April and Ask increased 6 percent.

Google an Increasing Source of Traffic to Key US Industries

Search engines remain the primary way fir internet users to navigate to key industry categories.

Comparing May 2008 with May 2007, the Travel, News and Media, Entertainment, Business and Finance, Sports, Online Video and Social Networking categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.