Google Responsible For More Than 14 Percent Of Online Retail Visits

MySpace Gaining Ground Accounting for 2.53% of Visits to Shopping Sites

NEW YORK, NY - August 31, 2006 - Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that Google was the top U.S. search engine responsible for 14.93 percent of U.S. upstream ¹ visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending August 26, 2006. Yahoo! Search was the second most popular search engine sending visits to Shopping & Classifieds websites, accounting for 4.69 percent of upstream visits for that week. MSN Search rounded out the top search engines accounting for 2.33 percent of visits to the category.

Top U.S. Search Engines Sending Traffic to Shopping and Classifieds Websites for the week ending 08/26/2006

Interestingly, social networking site MySpace.com accounted for 2.53 percent of all U.S. upstream visits to Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending August 26, 2006, up from 1.28 percent six months ago (week ending February 25, 2006). In that period, the market share of visits to MySpace.com has increased 67 percent among all websites, and MySpace.com captured 4.88 percent of all U.S. visits for the week ending August 26, 2006. The top Shopping and Classifieds websites that were visited after MySpace for the week ending August 26, 2006 were eBay, Amazon.com, Gateway, Walmart.com, and Craigslist.

"Search is a proven method of acquiring traffic and Google is the leader in driving online retail site traffic," said Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise. "With the growth of MySpace and others, online retailers should expand their focus beyond search to consider social networking sites as a source of additional traffic."

The top three brand search terms in the Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending August 26, 2006 were eBay, Craigslist and Walmart. The top three product search terms were Barbie, iPod and Heelys for the four weeks ending August 26, 2006 (see table below).

Top Search Terms Sending Visits to U.S. Shopping & Classifieds Category Websites for the four weeks ending August 26, 2006

About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,200 global clients with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise's patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search, and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into our easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement, and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise is a privately held company headquartered in New York City and operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence Analyst Weblogs at weblogs.hitwise.com.

###