A leading online competitive intelligence service, Experian Hitwise accounced yesterday that Google accounted for 71.57 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Nov. 28, 2009. Yahoo! Search received 15.39 percent, Microsoft’s Bing 9.34 percent and Ask.com received 2.65 percent. The remaining 52 search engines that were not explicitly named in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.07 percent of U.S. searches.

If you are interested in up-to-date analysis of online trends, you can visit the Hitwise Research Blog .

This table is not completely correct. The data is obviously a little slanted towards Google. It counts ALL traffic to Google, while it only counts a small portion to Yahoo. But even if that would be compensated, my guess is that Google still get over 50% of the US search traffic.

This picture is by the way completely different for other markets. In Japan for example the word Google is almost unknown. The market leader there is Yahoo, by far. So, if you want to reach somebody in Japan, you would focus your search engine optimization efforts on Yahoo.

There are also markets where basically only Google exists as far as search engines is concerned. One example of this would be France, where Google enjoys a whopping 91% market share.

Google’s market share in France was 91.23% for February 2009. The major search engines that trailed Google were Yahoo (2.43%) and Live Search (2.29%). Source: Google Blog.

For the US market you are, at least for the time being, save if you optimize for Google. The good thing: If you have optimized your web site for Google, you are already very close to a home run on Bing and Yahoo. The differences are not that big anymore.

SEO for Bing differs not that much from Google SEO or Yahoo SEO. Reducing SERP bounces is the most important on page factor in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as this factor monitors how good your content is. Or better how good your content matches the “ad”. The search engine listing is nothing more than an ad. If that ad matches what you deliver, you will have happy visitors that turn into customers.