Yahoo, Bing More 'Effective' Search Engines Than Google?

Google continued to dominate the U.S. search market in July, but Yahoo was most effective in getting users to actually click through to another Web site, according to data from Experian Hitwise.

Google had 66.05 percent of the search market last month, while Yahoo had 15.07 percent and Microsoft's Bing nabbed 12.98 percent. As part of a 2009 search deal between Yahoo and Microsoft, Bing last year officially started powering Yahoo's search results in the U.S. and Canada. As a result, Bing-powered searches accounted for 28.05 percent of U.S. searches.

But what search engine is turning up results that users actually want? Hitwise found that Yahoo had the highest "success rate," with 81.36 percent of its searches resulting in a visit to a Web site. Microsoft's Bing was second with 80.04 percent, while Google came in third with 67.56 percent.

"The share of unsuccessful searches highlights the opportunity for both the search engines and marketers to evaluate the search engine result pages to ensure that searchers are finding relevant information," Hitwise said.

The firm also found that longer search queries, or those with five to eight words, jumped 3 percent between June and July, though one-word searches were most popular at 25.32 percent.

In Wednesday data from comScore, Google Sites had 65.1 percent of the explicit core U.S. search market (which does not include Google Instant) in July, followed by Yahoo with 16.1 percent and Microsoft with 14.4 percent.

Web users conducted more than 17.1 billion explicit core searches last month, comScore said, up 3 percent from June. Google pulled in 11.2 billion searches, a 2 percent increase, while Yahoo had 2.8 billion and Microsoft had 2.5 billion, a 4 percent and 3 percent increase, respectively.