Statistics regarding search engines' market share can be difficult to interpret; it's often necessary to gauge the importance of a gain or loss in comparison to a companies' size, how Yahoo and Microsoft have performed in relation to each other and with respect to their rivals, and several other things.  But Experian Hitwise's April data tells a straightforward tale: Google won.

According to Experian Hitwise, Google increased its U.S. market share from 69.97 percent to 71.40 percent between March and April.  That works out to an increase of 2.0 percent, which is pretty impressive.

Meanwhile, Yahoo's market share headed in the other direction by 0.5 percent, shifting from 15.04 percent to 14.96 percent.  And Bing experienced an even worse decline, dropping from a market share of 9.62 percent to 9.43 percent (which equals a loss of 2.0 percent).

Finally, if you're curious, Experian Hitwise found that Ask suffered a catastrophic loss of users as its market share sunk from 3.44 percent to 2.18 percent (which works out to a loss of 36.6 percent).

April was definitely a good month for Google, then, judging by these stats.  It'll just be interesting to see if Google's victory looks quite as complete once the Nielsen and comScore numbers roll in.