Bing-powered search in the US now accounts for 30% of all searches, according to a study by data provider Experian Hitwise.
Experian Hitwise, a part of Experian Marketing Services, found that though Google remained a dominant player in the global search market, it slipped below 65% to 64.42% in the search category in the US in the four weeks ending 2 April 2011.
The report said Bing-powered search comprised 30.01% of searches for the month, almost equally divided between Yahoo and Bing, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 15.69% and 14.32%, respectively.
The remaining 69 search engines accounted for 5.58% of US searches in the report.
Yahoo’s search market share was about 30% when Microsoft first launched its own search engine in early 2005. Since then Google has nearly doubled its share.
The report stated that direct use of Bing was up 6% from February, and Yahoo Search with Bing was up 5%.
Google searches were down 3% from last month.
Yahoo and Bing may be gaining popularity because of more accurte searches. The report said that Yahoo Search and Bing achieved the highest success rates in March 2011. It said 81.14% of Yahoo Search users and 80.32% of Bing.com users clicked on a search result and visited a website. The figure was 65.91% with Google.
The study also found that longer search queries ranging form five to eight words were down 3% from February 2011 to March 2011.
