Travel and tourism continue to be top of the clicks in the UK, amassing a total of 41.6 million click thrus in the month of July.
This figure equated to 4.7 per cent of all web traffic in the UK, marginally ahead of activity generated by social networking sites such as bebo and MySpace during the same month.
The research from Neilsen//NetRatings shows that that Britons clicked on over 1.3 billion search results during July 2007, representing over 29,000 per minute.
Google, meanwhile, accounts for some 79.6 per cent of all web address clicks in the UK. Its nearest rival, Yahoo! could only manage a meagre 7.5 per cent, while AOL was responsible for 5.5 per cent of clicks, MSN/Windows Live Search 2.7 per cent, Ask.com 2.1 per cent and others, 2.7 per cent.
Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings explains: “Britons online are most likely to be searching for travel deals, social networks or reference information through sites like Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers.
“To see how deeply ingrained search is in the internet today, one needs to look no further than the fact the fourth most popular search destination is search itself. In other words, people use search engines to find other search engines!”
According to Nielsen//NetRatings, research sites (such as Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers) have the greatest percentage of visitors coming from search (79 per cent) followed by travel destinations (which include About Britain and Visit Scotland) with 68 per cent.
Reference and information sites enjoyed the greatest volume of visitors from search engines – whether it’s people looking for information on a place to visit, a local service, a hotel or something to buy. Research tools, dominated by Wikipedia, receive around four in every five visitors due to search engines.
