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Bing Searches Up 21 Percent in January

Searches conducted on Microsoft's Bing increased 21 percent in January, though Google and Yahoo held on to the top spots in terms of search engine share, according to Tuesday data from Experian Hitwise.

Bing captured 12.81 percent of the market, up from 10.6 percent in December, Hitwise said. Google, meanwhile, had 67.95 percent, down about 2 percent from 69.67 percent last month. Yahoo came in second with 14.62 percent, down 4 percent from 15.17 percent in December.

Hitwise also broke out Bing-powered searches, which accounted for 27.44 percent of traffic last month, up 6 percent. In August, more than a year after their search deal was first announced, Microsoft startedin the U.S. and Canada.

The news comes as Bing and Google are embroiled in a battle over search results. Google recentlyin Bing; a charge .

Hitwise also took a look at the search engines' success rate - meaning how many searches resulted in users actually visiting a Web site. On that front, Bing and Yahoo were the most successful, with about 82 and 81 percent success rates, respectively. Google had about 66 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.

In terms of paid clicks, Amazon was king, capturing 11.25 percent of all paid clicks in January. That was a 7 percent drop from December, but Amazon did capture the highest share of paid search traffic during the holiday shopping season.

"Among the top five sites in the Retail 500, Lowe's experienced the highest month-over-month growth in paid clicks (51 percent), while Sam's Club had the highest month-over-month increase (62 percent) among the top 20 visited retail sites in January," Hitwise said.

Hitwise also noted that longer search queries - searches with five to eight words - were up 5 percent last month, while shorter queries were down 1 percent. Most searches included two words, comprising 23.59 percent of all searches.

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