Having dominated search for over a decade, Google Inc continues to grow share of search volume according to figures published by Hitwise yesterday. A whopping 72.39% of searches in the USA in March were run in Google compared with 67.28% a year earlier. In the same year, Yahoo were the big casualty losing 4 share points to end up on 16.39%. Microsoft, who came in in third place, also lost share and now commands just 5.5% of searches.

As Google continues to grow share of searches, it becomes more and more important for online businesses to focus on Google as a key source of traffic. While it is never wise to put all your eggs in one basket, if time and resources to invest in Search Engine Marketing are limted, then the case for concentrating just on Google through Pay-per-click and/or SEO in the initial phase gets stronger all the time.

There are also some very interesting stats in the same hitwise report about multi-word searches which I will study in more detail and write about in the coming days.