Still the reigning
king of queries

Google accounted for 64.49 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ended October 27, 2007, while Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com accounted for 21.65 percent, 7.42 percent and 4.76 percent of searches, respectively, according to Hitwise, sister site MarketingCharts reports.

The remaining 49 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.68 percent of US searches, Hitwise said.

Google's share was up more than 3.5 percentage points, some 6 percent from the year-earlier period. Yahoo's was down nearly 0.7 percentage points, MSN's was down 3.3 points and Ask was slightly up by 0.42.

Google as Source of Traffic to Key Industries

Search engines remain the primary way that internet users navigate to key industry categories, Hitwise said.

Comparing October 2007 with October 2006 data, Hitwise found that the Travel, Entertainment and Business and Finance categories underwent double-digit increases in the share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

Health and Medical sites had the most traffic, 45 percent, coming from search engines in October, whereas Business and Finance had the least traffic — 17 percent — from engines, but its search engine traffic increased most from the Oct. '06: nearly 31 percent.