Experian’s Hitwise has reported that Google ruled the United States search market for the month of April. Half of all searches done during the month used Google. Hitwise also reported a sequence of increases in the company’s market shares. Hitwise specializes in custom web data and analytics. Data made public by Nielson/Netratings stated that Google searches increased from 69.97 percent to 71.40 percent of the market, an increase of 2 percent.

 

During the same time period, Yahoo received 22 percent of the search engine traffic, and MSN received 11 percent. Google ‘s market share also rose three percentage points for the year, while Yahoo remained the same and Microsoft’s percentage points went down slightly. The Microsoft Corporation’s Bing had declining April market shares of 2 percent, stalling at 9.4 percent. Yahoo stayed steady at 15 percent

 

Both Google and Yahoo have grown quite a bit over the past year. Google grew 34 percent while Yahoo had a growth of 27 percent. Coming in last was MSN search with 10 percent growth. The market share of Ask.com slipped down to 37 percent, which means it is dominating only a little over 2 percent of all search markets.

 

Shares of Google stock closed on Wednesday up $3.39 to $509.76. Vice President of Nielsen/Netratings Search Industry Solutions, Michael Lanz, says that Google has outdone itself by garnering half of all the searches in the United States. Lanz also stated that people are using the Internet more often to connect to many of the major retail stores. For example, the search term “Home Depot” had almost 2.5 million searches during April, while “Wal-Mart” had 2.3 million searches during this time.