Yahoo! was actually the only search engine to record a decrease in market share; even Ask was able to achieve an increase of 4%. Ask was actually the winner in month-over-month of all the top search engines. It boosted its online search share from a 2.28 to 2.37 percent, although this does not even come close to Google.

Here are the official statistics:

Automotive, shopping, health and travel were the categories where Google and Bing saw the biggest rise in traffic. This is good news for both, with the holiday shopping season just around the corner.

The use of search engines doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. When you compare August with September 2010, shopping and social networking categories showed increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

It does appear however that searchers are using less keywords in their search queries. Longer search queries (between 5 and 8 words long) decreased by 1% from August to September, this is perhaps something PPC advertisers should keep in mind.

While there has been no significant change in the results from August, it is something that Yahoo! would surely be worried about. Although their partnership with Bing wont fully come into effect until next month, Hitwise has results for "Bing powered searches" (Yahoo! search results that are powered by Bing) and the out look is grim. Market share fell 2% from 24.15% in August to 23.64% in September. Is there any hope for Yahoo?