• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, September 26, 2006

Hitwise recently announced that Google was the top U.S. search engine responsible for 14.93 percent of U.S. upstream visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending August 26, 2006, while Yahoo! Search was the second most popular, accounting for 4.69 percent of upstream visits for that week.

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. 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. The top Shopping and Classifieds websites that were visited after MySpace for the week were eBay, Amazon.com, Gateway, Walmart.com, and Craigslist.

Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise, concludes "Search is a proven method of acquiring traffic and Google is the leader in driving online retail site traffic... (but) 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 were eBay, Craigslist and Walmart. The top three product search terms were Barbie, iPod and Heelys.

For more data from Hitwise, please visit here.