Google Dominates, Receiving 88.14 Percent of Australian Searches in July 2008

‘facebook’ the most searched for term by Australian Internet users

Melbourne - 18 August, 2008 - Hitwise announced today that Google search properties (Google.com and Google.com.au) accounted for 88.14 percent of all Australian searches in the four weeks ending 26 July, 2008. This represents a 5.86 percent increase compared to 28 July 2007. MSN Search and Yahoo! Search properties each received 6.12 and 4.02 percent respectively, whilst the remaining 43 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.72 percent of Australian searches.

In comparison, in the U.S. market Google (www.google.com) accounted for 70.77 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending 26 July 2008. MSN Search and Yahoo! Search accounted for 5.36 percent and 18.65 percent respectively. 

Search Engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. When comparing July 2008 to July 2007, the Entertainment and Online Video industries have showed double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines. Upstream traffic from search engines to the Business & Finance and Social Networks industries decreased slightly.

Facebook the most searched for term in July

The most popular term searched by Australian Internet users during the 4 weeks ending 26/07/2008 was ‘facebook’, followed by ‘ebay’ and ‘youtube’.  During the same period in 2007 (4 weeks ending 28/07/2007), the most popular search terms then were ‘ebay’, ‘youtube’ and ‘myspace’, whilst ‘facebook’ ranked 38th. 

For more information please email press.au@hitwise.com or contact Rheika Tompkins on 03 8530 2400.

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,500 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.