Google Accounted for 59 Percent of All U.S. Searches in May According to Hitwise

Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that Google accounted for 59 percent of the volume of searches in the U.S. for May 2006, followed by Yahoo! and MSN, with 22 and 12 percent respectively. The remaining search engines tracked in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for the remaining 7 percent of U.S. searches.

“Google continues to lead the three major search engine providers in market share of executed searches, garnering more than half of the total volume of searches in May for the U.S.” said Bill Tancer, general manager of Global Research at Hitwise. “As the volume of searches stabilizes across the top three search engines, the battle to supplement search with additional services and win the loyalty of Internet users becomes critical.”

   Volume of Searches Among Top Three Search            Engine Providers (U.S.) ——————————————–                                       March- Domain               May-06  April-06   06 ——————- ——– ——– —— www.google.com         59.3%    58.6%  58.3% ——————- ——– ——– —— search.yahoo.com       22.0%    22.2%  22.3% ——————- ——– ——– —— search.msn.com         12.1%    12.6%  13.1% ——————- ——– ——– —— Source: Hitwise (www.hitwise.com) Data based on four week period: May (4/30- 5/27); April (4/2-4/29) and March (3/5-4/1) 

About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.

By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites. Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as affiliate programs, search marketing, online advertising, content development and lead generation.

Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.

More information about the Hitwise Competitive Intelligence service is available at www.hitwise.com. For up to date analysis on online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst blog at www.ilovedata.com.