BING GRABS 30% OF US SEARCH MARKET IN MARCH

According to Experian Hitwise, Microsoft’s Bing managed to pick up over 30% of all web searches in the United States last month, a 5% boost in search share from the previous month. Google’s spot at the top isn’t in danger though – the search giant held on to 64.42%, far and away the top spot, but Bing and Yahoo! (which uses Bing for search results) combined are making a dent in Google’s numbers.

The important thing to note here is that the result of the study says of all US web searches in March, 30.01% were performed by Bing – so those numbers include Yahoo! users and Bing users. Yahoo! signed a 10-year agreement with Microsoft to allow Bing to power searches performed at Yahoo! back in 2009. If you break down the numbers based on the sites where the searches were performed, Bing.com is back in third with 14.32% of all searches, right behind Yahoo! with 15.69%.

Both numbers pale in comparison to Google’s 64.42%, but when you realize that Bing’s database is behind both contenders, they represent a serious challenge to Google’s dominance, especially when you see that Hitwise’s numbers indicate Google is losing search share while Bing-powered searches are up 5%.

FACEBOOK MOST SEARCHED TERM AND VISITED SITE OF 2010

Social networking juggernaut Facebook was the most-searched term and most-visited website of 2010, according to Experian Hitwise. Facebook, which was the most searched term in 2009 as well, actually appears four times, in one way or another, on Hitwise’s top ten list; facebook login, facebook.com, and www.facebook.com ranked second, sixth, and ninth respectively. The social network’s site also accounted for 8.93% of all U.S. visits between January and November of 2010 — Experian does note that a combination of all Google-owned properties totals 9.85% of all U.S. page visits during the same period. Facebook beat out Google, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo!, and Youtube who came in second, third, fourth, and fifth respectively. [Experian Hitwise via BGR]

FACEBOOK PASSES GOOGLE IN WEB TRAFFIC

For the first time Facebook has passed Google in web traffic according to Hitwise, an internet analysis and intelligence company. Hitwise says that last week, Facebook saw 3% more web visits and nearly five times as many pageviews as Google.com.

Facebook has been on track to outgrow Google for awhile now. The young social network has seen a 55% year-over-year increase in its traffic numbers. The only metric in which Google is now beating Facebook is in monthly uniques: Google counted 173.3 monthly uniques in October, compared to Facebook’s 151.13 million.

What these numbers make clear is that, for most people, Facebook now is the Internet… and that’s got Google, as well as privacy advocates, scared. Google understandably doesn’t want most of the Internet traffic locked behind Facebook’s login, unavailable for them to index and spit out ads upon, which is why they’ve started going to war with Facebook, denying users of the social network the ability to import their GMail contact data into the social network. [Geek]

BING PASSES YAHOO

Microsoft's Bing search engine has surpassed Yahoo, but is still a long way behind market leader Google, according to newly released data by Nielsen.  In August, Bing grew from 13.6% to 13.9% of the US market, while Yahoo shrunk from 14.1% to 13.1%.  Google went from 64.2% to 65% during the same time.

This is good news for Bing, however it is less rosy than it seems.  In August Yahoo and Bing jointly announced that Yahoo search was now powered by Bing, effectively putting Bing in second place.

Nielsen states it only counts searches that users type in a search box and not ones that are automatically generated by search engines based on the users browsing habits.  It should be noted that comScore, Experian Hitwise and StatCounter still show Yahoo in second place followed very closely by Bing in third. [Ars Technica]