Hitwise has released it search engine market share data for the month of March.

Google continued to dominate, capturing 72.39 percent of all U.S. searches for the month.

Yahoo trailed with 16.36 percent of the search market share, falling 19 percent year-over-year.

MSN Search also saw its search share dip 17 percent year-over-year to grab 5.50 percent of the market.

Ask.com received 4.07 percent of the search market and dropped just one percent year-over-year.

Google was the only major search engine to see its search share increase, rising 8 percent year-over-year.

The length of search queries has increased over the past year, according to Hitwise. Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length have increased 8 percent between March 2009 and March 2008.

Searches of eight or more words increased 20 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries – those averaging one to four words long – have decreased 2 percent. Searches of two words accounted for the majority of searches, amounting to 23.17 percent of all queries.

Search engines continue to be the most popular way Internet users navigate to key industry categories.  Comparing March 2009 with March 2008, business and finance, sports, online video and social networking categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.