• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, February 14, 2007

As you bite into that delicious chocolate truffle your true love just gave you, you can enjoy the extra thrill of knowing that it probably cut into his or her productivity at work.

Data from oneupweb, which tracks search engine activity, shows that many people likely did their romantic gift-buying while at work: After tracking more than 250,000 online shoppers from Feb. 1 through Feb. 12, oneupweb reports that online purchases peaked on Tuesday, Feb. 6, while traffic was highest on Monday, Feb. 12. And online traffic on both weekends was weak.

"Using the office broadband may be more convenient or consumers may be trying to keep their purchases a secret," the company said. Cyber-shopping on Mondays and Tuesdays may also include a factor of romantics who spent time at a bricks-and-mortar store over the weekend, and came home empty handed.

Conversion rates -- the number of searchers who actually purchased something -- were consistent across search engines, oneupweb said. Oneupweb tracked activity on each search engine separately and found that traffic and sales ebb and flow at similar levels.

"As expected, Google is still Goliath, delivering 75% of the traffic, 72% of sales," it reported. "Yahoo provided 16% of traffic, 18% of sales. MSN trailed with 9% of traffic and 10% of sales."

Free search results provided 34% more traffic and 21% higher sales than pay-per-click ads or sponsored results.