Hitwise: Google has 65% of search queries

Researching holiday purchases brought an influx of customer to the web in December. According to the latest research from Hitwise, more than half of those consumers chose to use Google's search engine.

by Kristina Knight

Hitwise researchers found that just over 65% of searches in December were made through the Google interface. That is a slight increase (less than 1%) over searches made in November and a 2% increase in December 2006 searches. Close competitor Yahoo accounted for nearly 21% of December searches while MSN captured 7% of searches down 2% from December 2006 search numbers.

For different industries, Google and the other search engines probably helped to increase holiday shopping buys. Search engines pushed 44% of the traffic to health and medical websites and 33% of the traffic to travel websites. Search accounted for more than 26% of the traffic to shopping/classified websites and 21% of the traffic to news/media websites.

These numbers aren't a huge change from months past. Google has perennially been in the driver's seat when it comes to search engines. It is also no surprise that shoppers are coming to websites via a search engine. Many consumers admit to using the Internet to research products before buying them.

Whether looking for consumer reviews or the best prices on an item, consumers will turn to a search engine before typing in a specific store address, which means investing part of your online marketing budget in a search marketing platform is a good idea.