Nielsen Netratings reports that the number of online searches is increasing dramatically in the US.

Nielsen Netratings has just published new figures from its search engine statistics.

If these are to be believed the period of search engine growth is by no means over.

To give you some of the highlights:

• The volume of Internet search queries grew by 15 percent from June to October.
• Ask Jeeves is the fastest growing search site, showing an increase of 77 percent! Ask has now a market share of 2.6 percent.
• Google has a market share of 48 percent of all searches.
• Image search has grown by 37 percent from June to October.

The Ask Jeeves increase is too big to be taken at face value. We guess this is caused by the inclusion of various portals taken over by Ask Jeeves in the search results, Excite included. The statistics are based on panel surveys.

What can we learn from this? Firstly that search engine usage continues to increase, probably mainly because searchers are becoming more search savvy.

This is reflected in the strong increase in the use of vertical search tools like image search. Local search has increased by some 20 percent in the same period, news search by 13 percent.

Secondly that Google remains the most important search engine by far with nearly half of all searches. Yahoo! is far behind with only 22 percent. Google has in no way not lost the trust of the public.

MSN can report an 8 percent increase in searches, but it has only a 11 percent share of searches. Whether this is good or bad news for a giant like Microsoft can be discussed. The search technology is new, so we wouldn’t expect MSN Search to take over the world in a few months. The MSN portal, on the other hand is much older, and should probably expect more loyal users.

Thanks to InternetBrus for drawing our attention to this one!