jetboy_70 - 4:28 pm on Nov 11, 2004 (gmt 0)

Pete, you're leaving out some very influential factors, because Hitwise estimates traffic to a site, not searches on a site.

There are many more reasons to visit MSN than just search, whereas Google is primarily about search. Hence artificially spiked MSN figures.

In the UK, MSN users are redirected to the UK branded version by default, whereas Google users are free to use .co.uk or .com. Many do choose to use the .com version. Again, artificially spiked MSN UK figures.

Finally, MSN is the default page for Internet Explorer. Many users leave it that way. That doesn't mean they actively use MSN, but they will contribute to the Hitwise figures.