Google Goes to the Dolls.

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Author: Ebenkamp, Becky

As visits to online retail sites continue to accelerate into the 2005 holiday season, search continues to be a leading source for visits to Shopping & Classifieds sites.

According to online research company Hitwise, New York, Search Engines and Directories drove 17.9% of all visits to the Shopping & Classifieds category for the week ending Dec. 3, 2005. Google led the search pack by providing 10.8% of referrals to online retailers, while Yahoo! Search and MSN Search provided 4.1% and 0.8%, respectively. The largest category sending visits to Shopping & Classifieds sites was shopping sites themselves at 49.5%, indicating that Internet users are visiting multiple retailers within an Internet session.

In the Hot Toy Searches category, the most keyed in playthings were "Barbie," "American Girl" and "Build a Bear," which took third place from last year's "Yu-gi-Oh" during the four weeks ending Dec. 3, 2005. New entrants into 2005's top ten were "Airsoft guns" and "jigsaw puzzles," while "homies" had no home on this year's list.

The top search terms driving consumer traffic to sites in the Shopping and Classifieds-Appliances and Electronics category were variations of "iPod" and "Xbox 360."

Hitwise also concluded that search engines might benefit from offering more comparison searches at their sites: Nearly half of all visits to shopping sites (49.5%) originated from other shopping sites, which indicates that consumers are manually searching multiple online retailers to find the best deals available on holiday presents.

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Edited by Becky Ebenkamp