Experian company Hitwise has revealed that Google accounted for 72.07 per cent of all US searches conducted in December 2008, a six per cent increase on its holdings over the same period of the previous year.

Meanwhile, Yahoo! Search accounted for 17.79 per cent of searches, followed by MSN Search with 5.56 per cent and Ask.com with 3.15 per cent.

Overall in 2008, Google dominated the search market, accounting for 69.48 per cent of all those conducted by US web users, a rise of almost four per cent on 2007.

Hitwise also noted that key US industries were reached via search engines more in 2008 than in 2007.

Sectors including social networking sites, business, finance, sports and video reported significant increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

This success comes shortly after Google claimed that further progress needs to be made on its search abilities.

Vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer recently told TechRadar that it needs to move beyond "just keywords".