Google accounted for 64.1% of U.S. search traffic in March, according to traffic tracker Hitwise.
Hitwise's data, as Tancer reveals in Click, hasn't always led him in the right direction.
Web analytics company Hitwise reports that Wikia Search's traffic is still too small to measure.
Last February, Hitwise found that Google traffic to Wikipedia had increased 166% from a year earlier.
Since then, the site has languished with about 0.01% of U.S. searches, according to Hitwise.
Walmart.com is the second most visited e-commerce site on the Internet, based on Hitwise numbers.
Tancer also claims he can forecast bigger economic trends, as evidenced by Hitwise's growing hedge fund clientele.
Despite the intimate nature of those searches, privacy advocates have remained silent--if suspicious--about Hitwise's co-opting of ISP data.
But Tancer argues that Hitwise's "big picture" view of Web activity--rather than tracking individuals--keeps the firm out of privacy troubles.
In 2002, Tancer, a former Navy prosecutor, was working for the search engine LookSmart when he discovered the recently-launched start-up Hitwise.
And, Facebook also held the accolade for most-searched term two years in a row, per web tracking firm Experian Hitwise.
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About 52% of people surveyed in an Experian Hitwise report said they were overwhelmed by all the deal emails they get.
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Robin Goad, a research director at Hitwise who has analysed Twitter growth, said businesses were definitely starting to sign up to the micro-blogging service.
In particular, he said, Hitwise was starting to see the hijacking of hashtags - labels that bring all the messages about a subject together.
"The Times' traditional broadsheet competitors are best placed to pick up readers not willing to register or pay to see its content, " Experian Hitwise said.
He began using Hitwise's data to better target LookSmart's search advertising.
In Britain search sites overtook sex sites in popularity last October the first time any other category has come out on top since tracking began, says Hitwise.
Wikipedia pages, by comparison, receive more traffic from Google than any Web site other than Myspace or Google's own Google Images, according to Hitwise, a Web analysis group.
Kessler notes that data from Hitwise Experian shows Baidu as of mid-September had about 58.3% of the market, down from the low-to-mid 60s before Qihoo entered the market.
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Now Experian Hitwise is reporting a significant drop-off in Groupon traffic this summer, nearly 50% since its peak in the second week of June 2011 compared to last week.
Earlier this month online monitoring firm Hitwise found that visits to classified advertising websites were booming, with visits to such sites in the US up 84% on the same time last year.
Experian Hitwise says 12% of all the visits to Twitter last week were by new users, and the fastest growing group of users over the last year has been 35-44 year olds.
They're also big hits online, according to online media measurement firms Big Champagne and Hitwise, which measure the most swapped shows on BitTorrent networks and the most searched programs on the Internet, respectively.
"A big driver of traffic to Twitter last week was around the US Airways plane crash in to the Hudson River last Thursday, driving many posts and updates about the situation, " said Hitwise research director Heather Dougherty.
Tancer is the curator of 10 million users' Web browsing records--the complete history of every click and every search term--pulled from the logs of Internet service providers (ISPs) around the world who have either sold the data to Hitwise or traded it for free analysis.
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