Hitwise Search Engine
 

Hitwise uses a combination of anonymous web surfing data provided by ISPs in various countries and its own panel-based measurements to determine which sites are most popular on the web. The data encompasses the surfing activities of 25 million people, worldwide.

Share Of Visits: Search Sites, July 2005

The chart below shows the share of all visits made to both search and directory sites, as classified by Hitwise, by US web surfers during July 2005. "Domain" shows the core domain of the service involved. For comparison purposes, shares over the past three months are shown.

Understanding Share Of Visits

Hitwise measures all visits to sites that it classifies as being search engines or portals. It then tells you what percentage of those total visits a particular web site received.

To understand more, here's a simplified example. Imagine there are only three web surfers being measured in a particular month. They make the following visits to sites considered to be search engines or portals:

• Surfer A: 9 Google visits, 5 to Yahoo, 3 to MSN: 17 total visits
• Surfer B: 5 Google visits, 6 to Yahoo, 8 to MSN: 19 total visits
• Surfer C: 8 Google visits, 9 to Yahoo, 7 to MSN: 24 total visits

Add up all the visits, and you get 60 in total. Then add up the visits that each search engine or portal receives, divide that by the total visits for the category, and you know that site's share of total search and portal visits:

• Google: 22 visits / 60 total visits = 37% share
• Yahoo: 20 visits / 60 total visits = 33% share
• MSN: 18 visits / 60 total visits = 30% share

Share Of Visits: Portal Front Pages, July 2005

The chart below shows which portal sites, as classified by Hitwise, have the greatest percentage of visits to their home pages by US web surfers. Portals obviously offer more than search. A visit to Yahoo's home page may be someone checking news headlines, a stock portfolio or email. However, portals with high home page usage are likely to also generate searches from those pages.