Google accounted for 65.26% of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending September 29, 2012 according to Experian Marketing Services. The combined Bing-powered search comprised 26.58% of searches for the month, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 13.77% and 12.81%, respectively. The remaining 58 search engines[1] in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 8.16% of U.S. searches.

One word search queries increase 14% in September 2012

One word search queries increased 14% in September 2012 compared to September 2011. In September 2012, one-word searches comprised the majority of searches, too, amounting to 30.28% of all queries. Eight or more word searches saw 6% month-over-month increase. Shorter search queries — those averaging one to four words — increased 4% from September 2012 compared to September 2011.

Learn more about search here: http://hitw.se/QsTuKV

According to a new study by Experian Marketing Services, niche social networks significantly increased their market share of all visits to social sites, with Instgram and Pinterest leading the pack.

The following graph illustrates the global growth between July 2011 and July 2012, based on share of visits to all sites by country:

Other niche social networks that have experienced significant gain include Stock Twits in the US, Redidt in Australia, and FanPop in the UK.

According to Bill Tancer, head of Global Research at Experian Marketing Services, the growth of Instagram and Pinterest over the past year has been successful because they haven’t tried to be ‘another Facebook.’ Both networks are image based – something people love and relate to better than just words. For retail brands, sites like Pinterest present a great opportunity to promote products in a compelling and organized way to a wide group of people, globally.

Deeper functionally, combined with a lower technical barrier to entry, will result in new leaders in social media being created, accepted and used within a matter of days – compared to the rate of adoption happening now over the course of weeks and months.

Also included in the study for July 2011 to July 2012:

What social networks do you use most frequently? Do the results of this study surprise you at all? Feel free to share your thoughts with our readers in the comments section below.

Google accounted for 65.28% of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending September 1, 2012. The combined Bing-powered search comprised 26.96% of searches for the month, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 13.97% and 12.99%, respectively. The remaining 65 search engines [1] in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 7.76% of U.S. searches.

One word search queries increase 15 percent in August 2012

One word search queries increased 15% in August 2012 compared to August 2011. In August 2012, one-word searches comprised the majority of searches, too, amounting to 30.21% of all queries. Three and four-word searches saw 1% month-over-month increases. Longer search queries — those averaging five to eight words or more — decreased 11% from August 2012 compared to August 2011.

One-word searches increased 21%in July 2012 versus the same time for 2011

Experian Hitwise announced that Google accounted for 65.70 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending July 28, 2012. The combined Bing-powered search comprised 26.95 percent of searches for the month, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 13.83 percent and 13.12 percent, respectively. The remaining 65 search engines[1] in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 7.35 percent of U.S. searches.

One word search queries increase 21 percent in July 2012

One word search queries increased 21 percent in July 2012 compared to July 2011. In July 2012, one-word searches comprised the majority of searches, too, amounting to 30.47 percent of all queries. Longer search queries — those averaging five to eight words or more — decreased 11 percent from July 2012 compared to July 2011.

To understand the initial impact, we compared the total visits to NYTimes.com for a 12 day period before the launch of the pay wall to the 12 days following the launch. For the majority of the days, there was a decrease in the overall visits between 5% and 15%. The one exception was Saturday, April 9th, 2011 where there was a 7% increase, likely due to visitors seeking news around the potential government shutdown and ongoing budget discussions.

The effect of the pay wall has been somewhat stronger upon the total page views for the NYTimes.com, with the same comparison of a 12 day period before the launch of the pay wall to the 12 days following the launch. For all 12 days, there was a decline in total page views which ranged between 11% and 30%.

One caveat to the 20 article limit is to access NYTimes.com through search engines like Google and social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter. While using these sources could be a clever workaround for a reader hoping not to pay, to date there has not been a significant difference in the share of upstream traffic from both search and social networks to NYTimes.com before and after the launch of the paywall.

Beyond visit data; search volume of the top queries in the U.S. for 2010 versus 2009 demonstrates just how prominent Facebook has become in our Internet lives. Of the top 10 overall searches executed across the top search engines, social nets claimed five versus three in 2009.

While Facebook continues to increase its lead over other acquisition channels, it is important to consider that social networks must still play in the ecosystem of online channels, and other channels such as portals must find a way to incorporate social into their future. In recent news, Yahoo! unveiled its plan to partner rather than compete with Facebook, reinforcing the concept of integrated channel marketing (social, search and display) in the online space by signaling that if you can’t beat them…

To reinforce the concept of frenemies in the online landscape, below is a simple network map showing the flow of traffic between the major acquisition channels from the social network category’s perspective.

Analyzing the network map above, it’s immediately clear that search, as a category, is the most significant driver of traffic to social networks, supplying over 28%. The other significant takeaway from the map is that social nets are not only the largest category online, they also can behave as parasitic hosts, taking more traffic from all channels than they supply back.

While switching costs in the social networking space may make any build-our-own-net a non-starter, partnership can also present some distinct dangers. Partnering with networks appears to make sense, but now the critical focus should be on augmenting return traffic from networks.

My apologies to Sun Tzu for butchering his landmark phrase from the Art of War, but when you consider traffic flow; search engines, portals and web-based email providers should keep their friends close, but their frenemies closer.

Want to learn more about digital marketing in 2011? Click here to request a copy of Experian Marketing Services highly-anticipated 2011 Digital Marketer Report, launching in late March. The report features an editorial by Bill Tancer as well as unreleased data spanning email, social, mobile, search and more.

Experian Simmons DataStream found that while visitors to both Facebook and Google are making more frequent visits to each site in a given month today than they were two years prior, Facebook has seen its visitors’ average montly visit count rise at a much faster clip. As of February 8, 2010, Facebook visitors made an average of 11.7 visits to the site in the previous month, an increase of 21 percent compared to February 11, 2008 when Facebookers made only 9.6 visits to Facebook.com a month. During the same time, Google experienced only an 8 percent increase in the average number of visits its visitors made to Google.com each month. As of February 8, 2010, Google visitors made an average of 12.1 visits to Google.com in the previous month versus an average of 11.3 visits that Googlers made to the site in the month ending February 11, 2008. With momentum on its side, Facebook may soon exceed Google in both traffic and average monthly visits.

The following chart provides an update from my October post on this same subject. Notice that in late December, it looked like Google Maps was ready to overtake MapQuest. Last week, MapQuest had regained an 11% lead over Google Maps, up from 1.6% in the week to 3rd January 2009.

In October, MapQuest rolled out some new features. At the time, it looked as though MapQuest had already lost the momentum to hold the #1 spot but now that those features have been available for a few months, perhaps they are helping MapQuest regain a foothold.

The ascent of Google Maps is a result of the shortcut in the search results on Google. 61% of visits to Google Maps came directly from Google last week. Yahoo! Search was the site’s #2 referrer of traffic and accounted for only 1.07% of US visits. Google Maps received visits from 72,074 unique search terms in the past four weeks, compared to 11,466 for MapQuest.

MapQuest receives most of its search traffic from searches for its brand name – in other words from people actively searching for MapQuest. In the past four weeks 8 of the top 10 search terms sending visits to MapQuest were queries for the brand name, such as “mapquest”, “map quest” and “mapquest driving directions”. These 8 terms accounted for 62% of visits from search to the MapQuest website. Contrast that to Google Maps for which only 2 of the top 10 terms were branded and these only accounted for 4.2% of the site’s search traffic.

As long as Google dominates search, MapQuest will face a tough battle for visits. However, if the past few weeks are any harbinger, there may be life in the old dog yet!