Google continued to increase its market share of US searches, accounting for 70.77% of them for the four weeks ended July 26 - up 1.6 percentage points from June and more than 6 points, or 10%, from a year earlier - Hitwise announced.

Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com received 18.65%, 5.36% and 3.53%, respectively, of US searches in July.

The remaining 47 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.69% of US searches.

Search Traffic to Key US Industries

Search engines - and among them Google - remain the primary way that internet users navigate to key industry categories:

From July 2007 to July 2008, Entertainment, Business and Finance, Sports, Online Video and Social Networking categories recorded double-digit increases in the share of traffic coming directly from search engines.