On Friday July 30, the iPhone 4 was launched in Canada and Hitwise data reveals that Canadians turned to social networks, blogs and retailers after searching for the highly coveted phone. In the week after the launch (week to 7 August 2010) “iphone 4″ was the top Canadian search term that included the word “iphone”, [...]

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Canadians are heavy users of search engines and as we see in most markets, Search Engines are the top source of upstream visits to retail websites. In the month of June 2010, one third (33.21%) of upstream visits to Shopping and Classifieds websites came directly from a Search Engine. But, that is down year over [...]

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We Canadians are notorious for our weather talk. Last week’s heat wave in Ontario and Eastern Quebec, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal in particular, drove our obsession to new heights. Weather websites accounted for more than 1 in every 100 Canadian internet visits. Canadians were twice as likely to vistis Weather websites last week than were [...]

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Google Thursday announced an agreement to acquire ITA Software, a flight information software company. We at Hitwise have been waiting for such an announcement for some time. In 2006 when Google Finance was launched, we looked at the top downstream industries from Google and noticed an obvious gap: Travel. Then again in 2008, when Google [...]

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Rolling Stone Magazine last week published a tell-all account that led to the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal. On June 23, the day after the article appeared online, www.rollingstone.com became the #402 ranked website among All Categories of websites, up from #5,094 the day before the article appeared. Market share of Internet visits to the [...]

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The Ontario government surprised many of us a couple of weeks back with a cheque. Before many had seen news coverage of the HST (Harmonized Sales Tax) rebate, the funds had already made their way into bank accounts across the province. Hitwise data reveals that searches including the word “HST” peaked in the week ending [...]

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I wanted to elaborate on a point raised in my blog post last week about Shopping and Classifieds trends in Canada. I mentioned in the post that House and Garden websites enjoyed 26% growth in share of Canadian internet visits year over year to April 2010 to become the fifth largest retail industry in Canada [...]

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A recent Statistics Canada (StatsCan) report found that more Canadians are window shopping and making purchases online. This week we published a report on the online retail industry in Canada, Online Retail Trends and Opportunities, which similarly showed an 8% year over year increase in visits to Shopping and Classifieds websites in April. The most [...]

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Canadian internet searches for loans and credit cards showed gains year over year in the first quarter of 2010, reflecting the financial strain felt by consumers. Year over year, searches for loans increased 19.2% to the first quarter of 2010. Searches for loans showed a quarterly increase (comparing Q4 2009 and Q1 2010) of 42.5% [...]

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Canadian internet searches for properties for rent searches (e.g. variations of ‘apartments for rent’, ‘houses for rent’, ‘maison a louer’) experienced a sharp increase over the past year, with a 158.2% increase in the first quarter of the year and 150.2% year over year (comparing Q1 2010 with Q4 2009 and Q1 2009). The increase [...]

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