Yesterday’s press release covered how Google’s share of executed searches was 64% in March 2007, an increase of 10% versus March 2006. Here at Hitwise have seen search engines, and Google in particular, become a more important source of traffic for many websites and industry categories. The second table in the release lists key industry categories and increases in their share of traffic from search engines and Google. For instance, the Shopping & Classifieds category received 5.99% more upstream traffic from search engines from March 2006 to March 2007, it received 14.24% more traffic from Google. Thus, Google is growing faster as a source of traffic for sites in these categories than other search engines are. The chart below illustrates this increase nicely:

The increases in the share of traffic from Google over the past year is not surprising considering that market share of visits to Google (not including other Google properties such as image search or news) has grown to 4.52% of all Internet visits in March 2007, an increase of 18% since March 2006. There are no signs of Google slowing down anytime soon.