Tracking firm finds that 18.8% of U.S. Web visits were to 'adult' sites, 5.5% to top search engines.




SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Online porn sites get about three times more visits than the top Web search engines, including market leader Google Inc., a research firm said Thursday.

Web sites categorized as "adult" accounted for about 18.8 percent of all Internet visits by U.S. users in the week ending May 29.

Meanwhile, the category that contains search engines dominated by Yahoo, MSN and Google, accounted for about 5.5 percent, according to Hitwise Inc., a California-based company that tracks Web use.

During that time, Google garnered 2.7 percent of all Web visits while Yahoo Search and MSN Search received 1.7 percent and 1.1 percent respectively, Bill Tancer, vice president of research at Hitwise, told Reuters.

Other large Hitwise categories include "Entertainment" at 8.0 percent, "Business and Finance" at 7.4 percent and "Shopping and Classifieds" at 7 percent.

Google is moving toward an initial public offering that is expected to be a blockbuster.

The three leading search providers fall into a subcategory Hitwise calls "Search Engines and Directories," which covers 1,944 Web search and directory sites, which were not included in the top search category.

The subcategory, which accounted for 13.8 percent of all Internet visits, also includes AskJeeves.com, Yahoo.com and Microsoft's MSN.com. Yahoo.com is not included in the search category, but its search function is.

"Search Engines and Directories," along with the "Email Services," "Net Communities and Chat," "Software" and other subcategories, make up Hitwise's "Computers and Internet" category that pulled in almost one-third of all visits.


In a separate report published late last month, Hitwise said that between August and April, Google remained the most visited search site and was alone among the three sector players in gaining market share within its subcategory.

Hitwise also found that fast-growing comparison shopping sites such as Shopping.com, NexTag and Bizrate are getting fewer referrals from Web search providers -- meaning that users are either going directly to the niche sites or finding other routes to them, thereby cutting search engines out of lucrative shopping clicks.

The same appears to be true for top travel sites, Tancer said.

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