Google remains the top draw for searchers

Even with the increased use of Yahoo's Panama search engine and efforts by other search engines to increase their brand recognition, Google remained the number one search engine property in May according to research from Hitwise.

by Kristina Knight

According to a recent report Google accounted for more than 65% of total searches in May. Yahoo accounted for just over 20% of US searches, MSN brought in 8.4% of searches and Time Warner Network accounted for 3.92% of May searches.

As with months past, users are utilized their favorite search engines to find information on many subject levels. Search engines accounted for 44% of traffic to health and medical websites; Google accounted for 26% of that traffic. Travel was also impacted by the search engines at large (31% of traffic) and Google specifically (19% of traffic) as was shopping with search engines bringing in 24% of traffic and Google accounting for 15%.

Including search engines and paid search campaigns in an overall online ad campaign, then, could be crucial to the appeal of the campaign. With more users turning to search engines for destination points rather than inputting web addresses directly, a good paid search campaign could help point users to advertisers websites from the moment they input a query.