• by Shankar Gupta , January 12, 2006

Last month, Google accounted for 11.1 percent of all visits to classifieds and shopping sites--up 28 percent from December of 2004, according to new data by research firm Hitwise.

Google competitors Yahoo! and MSN accounted for a substantially smaller share of the pie, coming in at 4.05 percent and .79 percent, respectively. In total, search engines drove 18.3 percent of all visits to shopping and classified sites last month.

Although Google accounted for a larger percentage of visits to shopping and classifieds sites, a Hitwise report released last month showed that Yahoo! and MSN sent a higher percentage of their own users to the sites. For the week ending Nov. 26, Yahoo! Search sent 16.11 percent of visitors to shopping and classifieds sites, while 15.99 percent of searchers at MSN went to a shopping and classifieds site. Google sent just 14.46 percent of its searchers to such sites.

Hitwise also reported Wednesday that searches for MP3 players, especially iPods, accounted for a large share of traffic sent to shopping and classifieds sites. The share of searches with the word "ipod" was up 175 during this holiday season, compared to last year's. Searches on "mp3 player" were up 28 percent for the same time period.

Many consumers apparently received portable music players as presents; visits to iTunes and the other six top music download sites jumped by 172 percent from Dec. 24 to Christmas Day. Overall, visits to music download sites increased 183 percent for the week ending Jan. 1 compared to the prior year.