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Search, it’s what we do online

Search engine Google is the most popular website among New Zealanders, and by a healthy margin, according to the latest data from web tracking service Hitwise.

Google has three sites in the top 20 list, based on market share of visits by New Zealanders, giving it a combined share of almost eleven per cent of all website visits in February. If one were to include visits to Wikipedia (a searchable encyclopedia) then the search category market share would be even higher, at 11.6 per cent.

Hitwise Top 20 NZ sites - Feb 2007

I’ve divided the sites on the Hitwise Top 20 into nine categories and shown the market share of each category in the list below. Because these shares are based only on the top 20 list, they do not account for the “long tail” of smaller sites.

  1. Search   10.98%
  2. Email   4.07%
  3. Portals   3.99%
  4. Auctions   3.81%
  5. Banking   2.02%
  6. Social networking   1.65%
  7. News   1.57%
  8. Video   0.69%
  9. Encylopedia   0.63%

Email (Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail) was the second largest group in the top 20 sites with a combined market share of over four per cent.

Portals xtramsn.co.nz, yahoo.com and msn.com together accounted for just under four per cent. This will be the category to watch this month, as a result of the closure on March 1 of xtramsn which was immiediately replaced by yahooxtra [nz.yahoo.com] and msn.co.nz.

It’s good to see Hitwise releasing data again, after several months where their Data Center site was not updated.