Google Receives 87% of UK Searches in May 2008

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Google Receives 87% of UK and 68% of US Searches in May 2008

Search leader has greater market share in the UK than USA

London, June 10th 2008 Google search properties accounted for 87% of all UK searches for the four weeks ending May 31 2008, Hitwise announced today. This represents a 12 percent increase compared to May 2007. By comparison, Yahoo! search properties accounted for 4.09 percent of UK searches in May 2008, a 2 percent increase compared to April 2008. MSN search properties accounted for 3.72 percent and Ask search properties accounted for 3.07 percent of searches. MSN increased two percent compared to April 2008 and Ask increased 6 percent.

Percentage of U.K. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
Domain	May-08	Apr-08	May-07
Google Properties	87.30%	87.69%	78.28%
Yahoo! Properties	4.09%	4.01%	8.58%
MSN Properties	3.72%	3.65%	5.46%
Ask Properties	3.07%	2.89%	4.96%
Note: Data is based on UK Internet usage over the four week rolling periods (ending 31/5/2007, 26/4/08, 26/5/2007) from the Hitwise sample of 8.4 million UK Internet users. Note that the percentages for the search properties include the .uk and .com domains.
Source: Hitwise UK

In the US, Google accounted for 68.29 percent of all U.S. searches in May. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 19.95, 5.89 and 4.23 percent respectively. The remaining 41 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.63 percent of U.S. searches.

Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
Domain	May-08	Apr-08	May-07
www.google.com	68.29%	67.90%	65.13%
search.yahoo.com	19.95%	20.28%	20.89%
search.msn.com	5.89%*	6.26%*	7.61%*
www.ask.com	4.23%	4.17%	3.92%
Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending 31/5/2007, 26/4/08, 26/5/2007 from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. * - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.
Source: Hitwise

Google an Increasing Source of Traffic to Key Industries

Search engines continue to be the primary way for Internet users to navigate key industry categories in the UK. Comparing May 2008 to May 2007, the Sports, Online Video and Social Networking categories showed double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from Google (10%, 25% and 32% respectively).

UK Category Upstream Traffic from Search Engines and Google – May 2008
Category	Percent of Category Traffic from Search Engines, May-08	Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Search Engines, May-08 – May-07	Percent of Category Traffic from Google, May-08	Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Google, May-08 – May-07
Health and Medical	45.95%	-8%	34.01%	-2%
Travel	42.91%	0%	31.48%	9%
Shopping and Classifieds	35.81%	-1%	26.73%	8%
News and Media	27.27%	-5%	20.14%	2%
Entertainment	31.02%	1%	22.99%	8%
Business and Finance	31.93%	-5%	24.21%	3%
Sports	24.18%	3%	18.42%	10%
Online Video*	33.41%	15%	25.44%	25%
Social Networking & Forums	30.99%	24%	23.86%	32%
All figures are based on UK Internet usage
* denotes custom category

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,400 clients around the world 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 an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN) www.experiangroup.com 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 http://weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.