PENDLETON, OR – Google handles more than three times as many U.S. searches as its closest competitor, according to audience measurement firm Hitwise. In March, Google handled 67.25-percent of U.S. Web searches, reaching a record high and outdoing its closest competitor, Yahoo! (at 20.29-percent of searches) by more than 331-percent.It must have been particularly embarrassing, then, when hackers redirected a Google link to Blue Mountain Community College’s website to a… well, blue site. Blue Mountain Web Coordinator Jacque Talboy said the college was redesigning its website and changing the URL when hackers apparently crept into Google and redirected the previous address to a site containing hardcore porn.

Evidently, the attack was directed at Google and not the institution of higher learning, because Talboy said the hackers didn’t touch the site itself. She also said the search engine corrected the error as soon as it was made aware of the problem.

Not that Yahoo! probably didn’t get a few good yucks out of the deal — and the laugh most likely was welcome. Embroiled in a bitter battle to fend off a threatened hostile takeover by Microsoft Corp., Yahoo!’s search numbers have been declining slowly but steadily since last year, according to Hitwise. In March 2007, Yahoo! garnered 21.26-percent of all Web searches.

Google’s stats, on the other hand, have grown by 5-percent year-over-year during the same period.

MSN Search and Ask.com came in third among major search engines with 6.65-percent and 4.09-percent of searches during March, respectively. MSN’s searches were down by 26-percent over March 2007. Ask.com’s stats were up by 17.5-percent.

The remaining 46 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool together accounted for 1.72-percent of U.S. searches during March.