A recent study by Experian Hitwise shows Google search accounting for 71% of all U.S search with the closest search engine as Yahoo! with a cool 14%. According to the four-week study Bing and Ask.com are the two fastest growing search engines within their verticals and more complex keywords are being used in searches. Experian Hitwise collects and preforms analysis of traffic online and estimates that this trend will continue.

This week Facebook launched its Places application which should start appearing in searches and a recent comScore study found that the social network is now the third most popular U.S video site which begs the question: is Google search really growing steadily?

Its going to be a fast race this fall between who does become the leader in search. As more features are built out and users encouraged to stay within Facebook its going to become increasingly difficult to see the advantage in using a stand alone search engine that produces results based upon traffic and SEO not content that is voted on by users the way that ‘liking’ can rank results.

Even now when typing in search not just for friends but related items, the Facebook search box is showing results by ‘like’ rankings as seen in this screenshot below:

Is Google going to continue to be the leader in search? There is a huge gap between them and rising competitors but with traffic shifting online it will be interesting to watch no less and the scale in which other engines are growing might be faster than anyone is expecting.

For copies of the detailed report click here.