Yesterday we published our monthly search volume statistics, and as expected Google continues to dominate the space with 72.3% of all U.S. searches executed, while Yahoo! Search and Bing shares were at 14.8% and 8.9% respectively.
A far more interesting stat is the positive movement that we’ve seen in Bing’s success rate. At Experian Hitwise, we measure success rate as the percentage of executed searches that result in a visit to a site other than a main search domain.
Here’s a time series of success rates for Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing:

In October 2009, BIng’s success rate was well below the competition with a success rate just north of 70%. That rate has been steadily increasing, and now Bing is showing a success rate over 75%. There is one caveat when reading these numbers; search success rate is often influenced by the complexity of the search. Traditionally, portal search engines tend to have more simple navigational and brand related queries in their top searches which are easier to resolve then searches for information.
When examining the top 100 search terms from Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing, we find that nearly all terms are brand and/or navigational in nature for each engine. When we look at the percentage of searches that these top 100 terms account for on each engine, we find that Google is at 9.5%, Yahoo! Search is 15.1% and Bing is at 16.5%.
If we take navigational percentages into account, Bing would probably still trail Yahoo! Search in success rate, however, given the rapid improvement in this metric over the last three months, future success rate trends should prove interesting.