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Search Wars - Google Gains Market Share and Vertical Search Gains Popularity

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 25, 2004--Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service has released the latest U.S. Industry Report on the Online Search sector. Key highlights from this report include:
-- The top three search engines; Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search account for 5.5% of all U.S. Internet visits.

Hotel Booking -- During the period of August 2003 to April 2004, Google experienced a growth in U.S. market share against all sites of 30.9%. During that same timeframe, Yahoo! Search registered a modest 2.4% growth rate and MSN Search had a loss of -15.4% market share of U.S. visits.

Also in the third quarter, ScanSoft continued to experience solid demand for its speech solutions, leading to market share gains in geographic and vertical markets.

Travel Agency -- Amongst the leading three engines, Google experienced a net gain in U.S. visits (i.e.. received more visits than it delivered) from both MSN Search (0.08%) and Yahoo! Search (2.06%), while both MSN Search and Yahoo! Search experienced a net loss of U.S. visits to Google (-1.46% and -0.60% respectively).

February 6, Seattle Times Seeking to shelter While Google agreed to censor its search data in China, gaining an unlikely defender in Microsoft, another technology company took the opposite approach. February 3, CNET News When Google is not your friend Google's recent legal spat with the U.S. Department of Justice highlights not only what information search engines record about us but also the shortcomings in a federal law that's supposed to protect online privacy.

Cheap Hotel -- MSN Search has the highest percentage of U.S. visits from the very lucrative categories of Shopping and Classifieds, Business and Finance, and Travel.

They also have the largest Internet exposure for Mexican food keywords through search engine visibility and link popularity (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and the like) that bring direct traffic to MexGrocer.com. In addition, they gain exposure on a network of partnered sites such as Amazon.com¯ Gourmet Food store. Their intelligent placement on the Internet has made them a role model written about in the August 2004 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine (Ñn the Click and in a recent book by Robin Miller, ßhe Online Rules of Successful Companies (2003 Prentice Hall).

Flight Booking -- Yahoo! Search and Google are stronger in receiving U.S. visits from the categories of Education, News and Media and Entertainment.

The online search universe is expanding but does this mean that more people will start using a wider variety of search tools to find what they want online Or, does the advent of the Google Universal search model mean that the vertical search space is finished Join Kevin Ryan & the highly respected Mike Grehan, Vice President, International Business Development, Bruce Clay Inc, as they debate the significance of Google’s revamp on “the search universe” and how searches conducted across the other major search engines could be impacted.

Travel Agent -- Vertical search sites in the Shopping & Classifieds and Travel categories are experiencing very strong growth with a concurrent decrease in referral U.S. visits from search engines, indicating potential user preference for vertical specific search.

We do all the work to find guests for your hotel at no extra cost to you. Through gtahotels.com we can market your hotel and we also have relationships with other sites to increase traffic through to ours. Our partnerships with search engine websites such as commissionjunction.com, kelkoo.co.uk, nextag.co.uk and travelsupermarket.com ensure that the gtahotels.com inventory gets maximum exposure. We regularly feature at the top of google.com search results. Your hotel could be seen by potentially thousands of travel consumers each day!

Hotel Chicago -- Both Yahoo! Search and MSN Search capture more of the lower U.S. income demographic of $30,000 -$60,000 annual household income. Yahoo! Search stands out in the younger U.S. age demographic of 25-34 (25.99%), while MSN Search is stronger with U.S. females (54.26%).

Online Booking For a copy of the Hitwise U.S. Online Search Report, please contact Lizzie Babarczy on (212) 331-1283 or lizzie.babarczy@hitwise.com

Travel Health Insurance About Hitwise:

Hotel Reservation Hitwise is the world's leading provider of online competitive intelligence services. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.

London Hotel Booking By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites. Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as affiliate programs, search marketing, online advertising, content development and lead generation.

Discount Travel Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia and operates in the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Orlando Hotel Contacts

Booking Agency
Hitwise
Lizzie Babarczy, 212-331-1283
lizzie.babarczy@hitwise.com

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