Last week, we did a blog post on the top categories visited by Canadian internet users. We followed that up with a post looking at the number of words used in queries. To follow this theme, today we are posting on what Canadians are searching for online. The following table shows the top search terms entered into search engines by Canadian Internet users in the twelve weeks to 30th May 2009. The table is divided into two columns to show the highest volume navigational search terms (meaning that most searchers had a clear intent to reach a particular website) and the highest volume generic terms.

Is Twitter, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt opined last week, the poor man's email? Is it a Facebook or Google killer? What can clickstream data tell us about how people are using Twitter and how does that compare to email, Facebook and search engines? The following table shows the top 20 websites visited after Twitter.com in February:

I noticed Ryan Spoon's blog post (via Techmeme) on PerezHilton.com's growth this morning. I have followed the Perez Hilton site (for purely professional reasons) for some time. The website ranked #398 among All Categories of websites last week and #5 among Entertainment - Personalities websites (based on share of US Internet visits).

January is the peak season for visits to employment websites and with unemployment numbers climbing ever higher, this year was no exception. Each year, visits to employment websites peak the second week of January. This year visits to websites in the Employment and Training category were 17% higher than in January 2008. Growth is due to continued natural growth for the category (see chart below illustrating that visits have been growing for the past three years), as well as rising unemployment rates and job uncertainty.

Today we are releasing data and analysis on the top 50 search terms entered into YouTube's own search engine, revealing that 72% of searches are music related. We did this analysis using our Conversions technology which we use for custom projects for clients. We, on the Hitwise research team, requested this data when we saw the news in November that Google would be testing an auction based system for ads on YouTube.

This morning I was reading an excellent piece on Ars Technica asking the question Did "Lazy Sunday" make YouTube's $1.5 billion sale possible?. I looked back at our data and blog posts over the past few years to see whether we can help answer the question. To remind readers, "Lazy Sunday" refers to a Saturday Night Live "rap about a pair of lame white guys from the Village who wanted nothing more than to spend a Sunday afternoon in the theater, watching The Chronicles of Narnia". NBC Universal's general counsel, Rick Cotton, said (at DMW's Future of Television Forum East last week) that he believes that the SNL skit vaulted YouTube to popularity. We blogged about this skit the week after it aired in December 2005, showing that in one week, the skit propelled YouTube ahead of Google Video with much of that traffic coming from MySpace. Visits continued to climb from there.

Virtual worlds are hugely popular online but retailers still often struggle with how to market via these worlds. As marketing budgets are being cut, retailers need to make an ever stronger case for new initiatives. The recent promotion that Kohls has run with Stardoll offers an interesting example of how to tap into this audience.

I noticed Michael Arrington's post on Facebook shutting down a Slide.com application and checked Hitwise data to compare Facebook and MySpace clickstream data in particular to Photography websites. The differences are interesting and highlight different interests of users as well as a different profile of user. Facebook sends far less traffic to Photography websites than does MySpace. Last week, 0.67% of downstream visits from Facebook went to Photography websites compared to 4.26% from MySpace.

I got a request today to update the chart I posted back in February comparing the online audience for Yahoo! Search and Google.com given yesterday's announcement about a advertising deal between the two. Last time I did the analysis I found an age gap - with Yahoo! Search users skewing younger than Google.com users - and also found that Google users tend to be bigger spenders online. The age gap has closed slightly so that Yahoo! Search users still do tend to skew younger than Google but by a smaller margin than in February.

Hulu.com., the joint venture between Fox and NBC that provides streaming video content online, announced a deal this week that The Colbert Report and The Daily Show are now available through the site. Hulu.com came out of beta on March 15 and has seen a steady share of US Internet traffic since, as illustrated in the following chart.

Mixx.com, the social news website supported by many big mainstream media brands, is in the news for releasing results that show its traffic has more than doubled in May. I was following the thread on this story this morning on Techmeme and thought I'd share some Hitwise data that may answer some of the questions being raised. Marshall Kilpatrick at Red Write Web suggests that while the growth is impressive he is surprised the site receives less than 5% of the traffic that goes to Digg. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch points out that the growth in May came as a result of links from the bottom of all CNN.com stories.

Last week we issued a news release titled Coldplay's Free Single Propels Website to #1 Online Among Bands and Artists. We found that U.S. visits to Coldplay.com increased 19 fold on the back of the band's new single, Violet Hill, being released for free online. On April 29, 2008, the day the single was released on Coldplay.com, the website ranked as the most visited website among the Bands and Artists category. A little more than 1 out of every 40 visits to Bands and Artists category went to Coldplay's website that day.

Twitter, the micro-blogging platform, has been in the news quite a bit lately (in particular for VC funding and rescuing a US blogger). This has helped drive US Internet visits up further to the increasingly popular service. Year on year, Internet visits to Twitter.com are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month.

A colleague forwarded me a fantastic article from Ad Age "It's Web 3.0, and Someone Else's Content is King". The article is worth a read for anyone in the content business. The author, Matthew Creamer, suggests that Web 3.0 will be about monetizing the web's openness and points to examples in the news business of websites aggregating other people's content for profit. Are content aggregators in fact growing in popularity? The author cites Michael Wolff of Newser: "The space is heating up". According to internet usage data, is it?

This morning I was interested to see the thread on Techmeme's homepage about the success so far of Yahoo! Buzz. The RedWriteWeb story provides statistics on traffic from Yahoo! Buzz to some of the publishers involved in the Beta. ReadWriteWeb claims that Yahoo! Buzz "spells trouble for Digg". What do the figures show?

Sports Illustrated has published its annual Swimsuit Issue. I noticed the website in my weekly fast movers report and thought it could make a fun post. When I looked at the data however, something struck me as really odd. The top search term sending visits to the Swimsuit Issue website was "si swimsuit issue". The term had a huge spike this year but was relatively flat for the past two years. I had expected it to spike for each annual issue. What did this year's issue include, I wondered, to cause such a frenzy online.

Yahoo! Search attracts a younger audience than Google. I promised a post with figures to back up my claim (sorry I am a day late - forgot it was Valentine's Day!). The following charts show the percentage of visits from each age group to Yahoo! Search and Google.com.

A colleague sent me an email about Mark Malkoff moving into Ikea while his NY apartment is fumigated. I checked Hitwise data and found a nice spike in traffic to the marklivesinikea.com website and in searches for "mark malkoff", with Thursday the biggest day for visits to the website. The stunt has no doubt been good for Mark's career. But what about Ikea. This is where things get interesting... Ikea is hosting their annual post-holiday sale and this stunt is likely cheaper than expensive TV ads.

It is rumored that Steve Jobs will announce a video rental service for iTunes in his much-anticipated MacWorld keynote on Tuesday. Adding fuel to the fire of speculation, Netflix has preempted Apple's announcement saying it will offer unlimited access to its streaming video library to most customers. To lend context to the announcements, I wanted to profile Netflix and Blockbuster, the two biggest players in online movie rental.