Compete has released its search market share data for March 2011 based on the search behavior of the company’s panel of more than 2 million U.S.-based internet users.

Search activity picked up in March with a 9.2 percent month-over-month increase in total query volume across the engines and all five major engines experiencing query volume growth.

Among notable findings for March:

•    Bing continued to gain market share, capturing 17.5 percent of web queries in March. Among the top three engines, it experienced the highest M-O-M query volume increase of 12.6 percent.

•    Yahoo! also gained 0.3ppts in share this month, bringing the total share of Bing Powered engines to 31.7 percent of the market.

•    While still the market leader with 63.8 percent share, Google experienced another decline in share in March, dropping 1.2ppts.

•    March was the first time in several months that both Ask and AOL gained some traction; double-digit percentage increases in M-O-M query volume drove incremental share gain for both engines.

To learn more, visit Compete.