Internet Search Report: Google Up; Yahoo, MSN Down

Google (GOOG) accounted for 68.29 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending May 31, 2008, Hitwise announced Tuesday. Yahoo! (YHOO) Search, MSN (MSFT) 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 5/31/ 2007, 4/26/08, 5/26/2007 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.

In the U.K. market, Google search properties (Google.co.uk and Google.com) accounted for 87 percent of all UK searches in May 2008 representing a 12 percent increase compared to May 2007. 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%
Microsoft 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 5/31/ 2007, 4/26/08, 5/26/2007) 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.

Google an Increasing Source of Traffic to Key U.S. Industries

Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing May 2008 to May 2007, the Travel, News and Media, Entertainment, Business and Finance, Sports, Online Video and Social Networking categories showed double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

U.S. Category Upstream Traffic from Search Engines and Google - May 2008

Category	Percent of Category Traffic from Search Engines, May-08	Percentage 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	45.76%	3%	30.86%	5%
Travel	34.81%	11%	24.26%	21%
Shopping and Classifieds	25.48%	2%	16.84%	8%
News and Media	21.70%	7%	14.53%	10%
Entertainment	24.33%	17%	15.76%	22%
Business and Finance	18.15%	14%	11.73%	22%
Sports	13.09%	17%	8.81%	24%
Online Video*	29.94%	37%	20.78%	52%
Social Networking*	16.50%	18%	9.98%	21%

Source: Hitwise

* denotes custom category

All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users.