Microsoft Bing takes search audience away from Google Google is still the most popular search engine, accounting for 65 per cent of the US market, says the latest data covering May 2012 from Experian Hitwise, an online data measurement company. However, the search giant's share decreased on the year by five per cent from 68.1 per cent - while Bing's share increased by five per cent during the same period - rising to 28.1 per cent from 26.79 per cent last May. Yahoo's search engine, which has fused business operations with Microsoft, account for 14.9 per cent Experian Hitwise bases its monthly search share reports on a sample of 10 million internet users" behaviour. However, the figures are for web searches only and don't include mobile search data. The report also noted that one-word searches comprised the majority of searches in May 2012, amounting to nearly 30 per cent of all queries and has increased 19% year-over-year. "As automated search features have rolled out across the major search engines, we can expect to see one-word searches continue to increase as they have over the past year," said Simon Bradstock, general manager of Experian Hitwise. The long tail is not going away, rather just becoming more intensified within the shorter queries, and in turn marketers need to focus more on how consumers start their searches.