searches

Microsoft's Bing accounted for 5.25 percent of all U.S. searches for the month of June, according to the latest data from Hitwise. Google continued to hold on to its dominant position growing 7 percent year-over- year capturing 74.04 percent of the U.S. search market for the month. Yahoo landed in the second position with 16.19 percent of the search market, but saw its growth drop 17 percent year-over-year, while Ask received 3.15 percent of searches with its growth slipping 22 percent year-over-year.

If you're tired of hearing about Michael Jackson already, I'm sorry, but he's still dominating the news and the web. He's still responsible for two of the trending topics on Twitter at this time (Michael Jackson and MJ). You've probably read about the effect Michael's death has had on the web. It also had a huge impact on people downloading and buying his music. It had a big impact on searches as well. Hitwise has released some data about the top Michael Jackson songs, albums and lyrics that were searched for after his death.

Bill from SEO By The Sea published a good article entitled "Writing Content for Small Businesses Online", in which he talks about search taxonomies. For those new to the topic, I thought I'd go over it, and show it applies to SEO strategy.

Murdok recently spoke with Search Engine Land Assignment Editor, and SmallBusinessSEM.com Blogger Matt McGee about local search and its impact on business owners. The local search game has changed over the years, and even more so within the last couple months. Do you think a Google search is the most important place to be found in local search? Share your thoughts.

Google is researching how users of the search engine search the web when someone they know is sick. Google calls this a temporary experiment, but one that people might find interesting. This experiment will trigger a poll question on a small percentage of random health-related searches. In cases where these occur, users will see see boxes like these in their search results:

Google is blocking searches originating from torrent sites using Google Custom Search to find .torrent files, according to TorrentFreak.com, a move the founder of the site calls “censorship.”

If a country were ever to attempt to invade Britain again, they should consider saving their firepower and invest in cats and clowns with excellent vocabularies. According to Hitwise, after a fear of flying, folks in the UK search about these fears more often than any others.

I got in touch with a couple of people from Yahoo including Tom Chi, Senior Director of Product Management for Yahoo Search, about their new feature called Search Pad. Essentially, it keeps track of your searches, figures out when you are researching things, and stores results of interest in a virtual notepad you can use for reference. The following video will give you a pretty good idea of what it does: