• Google accounted for 67.95% of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Jan. 29, 2011.
• Yahoo! Search and Bing received 14.62% and 12.81%, respectively. Bing.com searches increased 21% in January 2011.
• Bing-powered search comprised 27.44% of searches for the month, an increase of 6%.
• Bing and Yahoo! Search achieved the highest success rates in January 2011. This means that for both search engines, more than 81%of searches executed resulted in a visit to a Website. Google achieved a success rate of 65%.
• Longer search queries — five to eight words — were up 5% from December 2010 to January 2011. Shorter search queries — those averaging one to four words long — decreased 1% from December 2010 to January 2011. Two-word searches comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 23.59% of all queries.
• Out of all paid clicks to the top 500 retail sites, Amazon captured the majority of traffic, or 11.25% of all paid clicks for the four weeks ending Jan 29, 2011.

Interesting post over at the Hitwise blog which talks about the latest hype surrounding Groupon/Living Social and the interest from large corporations such as Amazon/Google. Here are the highlights:

• Groupon.com received 79% of US visits last week and Living Social received 8% among a custom category of 81 Group Buying sites last week
• There are reports that Amazon is poised to make a $150 million dollar investment in Groupon competitor LivingSocial.
• First, (the site) appeared in Spring of this year, that Living Social’s visit growth would make it a viable threat to Groupon. As the chart denotes, that growth-spurt was very short lived.
• Second, if we look at the graph’s end-point, Living Social’s market-share is almost an order of magnitude lower than Groupon’s.
• So one-tenth of $6 billion dollars is less than Living Social’s projected valuation. Of course traffic to valuation is a gross over-simplification. Perhaps Living Social’s audience composition would validate a higher value.
• The main difference between the two audiences, is that Groupon has clearly “crossed the chasm” in Geoffrey Moore speak, with strong showings in types like Mosaic type C02 – Prime Middle America. Probably the most interesting difference is the percentage of Young Cosmopolitans – type H01 that are frequenting LivingSocial.
• From prior analysis we know that Young Cosmos are one the strongest early adopter segments. Despite the very unimpressive traffic numbers, perhaps Amazon is recognizing the potential for LivingSocial to move beyond its current early adopter phase.