Google Receives 66 Percent of U.S. Searches in February 2008

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Google Receives 66 Percent of U.S. Searches in February 2008

Google and MSN searches increase 1 percent versus Jan-08;

Ask.com up 18 percent year-over-year

NEW YORK, NY – March 4, 2008 - Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that Google accounted for 66.44 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending February 23, 2008. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 20.59, 6.95 and 4.16 percent respectively. The remaining 46 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.87 percent of U.S. searches.

Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
Domain	Feb.-08	Jan.-08	Feb.-07
www.google.com	66.44%	65.98%	63.90%
search.yahoo.com	20.59%	20.94%	21.47%
search.msn.com	6.95%*	6.90%*	9.30%*
www.ask.com	4.16%	4.21%	3.52%

Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending 2/23/08, 1/26/08; 2/24/07) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users. * - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search.
Source: Hitwise

Google an Increasing Source of Traffic to Key Industries

Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing February 2008 to February 2007, the Travel, Entertainment, Business and Finance and Sports categories showed double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

U.S. Category Upstream Traffic from Search Engines and Google - February 2008

Category	Percent of Category Traffic from Search Engines, Feb-08	Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Search Engines, Feb-08 – Feb-07	Percent of Category Traffic from Google, Feb-08	Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Google, Feb-08 – Feb-07
Health and Medical	43.74%	-1%	28.69%	-1%
Travel	32.97%	9%	22.17%	19%
Shopping and Classifieds	25.30%	0%	16.26%	6%
News and Media	21.43%	3%	14.04%	6%
Entertainment	23.98%	13%	14.96%	13%
Business and Finance	17.46%	13%	10.97%	23%
Sports	13.53%	14%	8.75%	19%
All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users.
Source: Hitwise

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,400 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.