Google Moves Past MSN

Internet analyst Nielsen//NetRatings has announced in a statistics report that the Google brand has surpassed MSN. The statistics apply to the month of May 2006 and have taken into consideration top 10 Web sites by parent company and by brand. "A parent company is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs owned by a single entity. A brand is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs that has a consistent collection of branded content," stated NielsenNetRatings in its report.

Microsoft leads the top 10 parent companies with a small advantage over Yahoo, gathering a volume of unique audience of 114,330,000 per month while Yahoo stopped at 105,000,000 unique visitors, this although Yahoo users have proven to spend an estimated average 3.30 hours on the online giant's sites in comparison with an average of 2 hours spend by users on Microsoft's sites. Time Warner is third with 102,247,000 unique visitors, while the forth position is occupied by Google who situates well under the 100,000,000 unique users per month.

In the top 10 by brand, Yahoo steals the first position from Microsoft, offering online locations that have broken the 100,000,000 unique visitors per month by over 5 million. Microsoft is runner up with 98,977,000 unique users. According to NielsenNetRatings, Google has bested MSN in this ranking by over 5 million users. The brand owned by the Mountain View Company has amassed a unique audience of 95,355,000 and is dangerously close to Microsoft.

"The data indicates that 39.3 million home and work Internet users visited at least one of the
New York Times Company-owned sites or launched a New York Times Company-owned application
during the month, and each person spent, on average, a total of 14 minutes and 52 seconds at one or
more of their sites or applications," stated the Nielsen//NetRatings report.