WebProNews

It's time for another mini-party at Google and some more mourning at Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask; a certain search giant cornered a U.S. market share of over 70 percent in July, according to new Hitwise data.

Granted, non-fans can take small comfort in the fact that Google's got higher market shares in the U.K. and France, and 70.77 percent is still quite a ways away from complete ownership of the American search market.  Most stats are piled in Google's favor, however.

 Google Tops 70 Percent In July
(Credit: Hitwise)

First, there's simply the standing of every company.  As Google sits atop the heap, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask follow with somewhat pitiful market shares of 18.65, 5.36, and 3.53 percent, respectively.  And the prospect of combining the shares and technologies owned by Yahoo and Microsoft seems to have passed, of course.

Then, Heather Dougherty writes, "The market share of visits to Google in July increased 25% over July 2007 and has grown each month since January in 2008.  Retention of this increased traffic is also coming into play as Google has maintained a consistent returning visitor rate (visitors who have visited the website within a 30 day period) of 95% each month since October 2007 (when Hitwise began tracking this metric)."

All things considered, it's a good bet that Eric Schmidt is already ordering banners with the figure "75%" printed on them.