FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Matt Tatham - Hitwise - 1.212.380.2939

Health and Medical Websites Received Highest Percentage of Visits from Search Engines Last Week

Education, Food and Beverage, Government and Community Next Largest Categories

NEW YORK, NY - October 17, 2006  - Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that the Health and Medical category received the largest amount of traffic from search engines, 43.51 percent, for the week ending October 14, 2006.

The categories that received the largest amount of their traffic from search engines following Health and Medical were the Education category, at 41.58 percent, followed by the Food and Beverage category, at 39.90 percent, and the Government category, at 31.76 percent of traffic. The Community category received 30.99 percent of traffic from search engines for the week ending October 14, 2006.

"Category search term data highlights the importance that search plays in consumer's quest to find information at an industry level. Health and Medical sites, specifically those offering products and services in alternative health would be smart to consider this data when allocating search marketing budgets," said Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise. "Our percentage traffic from search metric is a great example of the power of competitive intelligence; marketers should use this data to gauge their effectiveness in search."

Seven of the Top 10 sub-categories receiving traffic from search engines came from the Health and Medical category. The top sub-categories were Health and Medical - Alternative with 61.63 percent of traffic from search engines followed by Computers and Internet - Graphics and Clip Art with 60.26 percent of traffic. The next two sub-categories were Health and Medical - Research and Health and Medical - Information. The Education - Reference sub-category rounded out the top five sub-categories receiving the largest amount of traffic from search engines for the week ending October 14, 2006.

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,200 global clients with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise's patented methodology captures the anonymous online usage, search, and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into our easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement, and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise is a privately held company headquartered in New York City and operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends and statistics, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence Analyst Weblogs at weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.

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