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Hitwise Intelligence has released their latest data of Search Market share for the month of July. The results are no different from the ones that were released a month back in terms of the story that they tell, which continues to be that “Google is slowly but surely gobbling up the search market”. July’s data is even more significant in a way because now Google accounts for 70.77% of all U.S. searches.

Google’s share of searches increase by an overwhelming 10% over the same month last year and over 2% since last month. Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask trailed far far behind at 18.65%, 5.36% and 3.53% respectively.

Hitwise attributes part of this growth in Google’s search market share to its growing legion of web properties which are now attracting more visitors who in turn are using Google more often. Traffic to Google has continued to increase since the past 13 months and it has now surpassed Yahoo has the most visited online destination. 

The market share of visits to Google in July has increased 25% over the same month last year and has grown with each passing month since January 2008. Google has not only managed to pull in more traffic, it has done exceedingly well in retaining it. Google has been able to maintain a consistent returning visitor rate of 95% each month since October 2007.

With this exceptional performance Google is now almost as much of a monopoly in Web Search as Microsoft is in Operating Systems. Microsoft’s XP enjoys the luxury of sitting on the desks of around 90% of all users. On the other hand Windows Vista, which has been a mega failure, has only managed to bag 6.3% of the market according to Forrester research. The low adoption of Windows Vista will mean that although Microsoft still is a huge monopoly in Operating Systems it will not be able to pull the same sort of revenues it used to do with its OS business since no one is upgrading. This upgrade and buy cycle is different from that of the Web’s revenue model where your market share translates to hard cash day in and day out

Tough times for Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask ahead, and even better days yet to come for Google – provided if we don’t end up in recession.