In theory, shouldn’t a comprehensive search engine use top results for queries made on other search engines as a data input for its algorithm? Of course, said engine should also be upfront about that practice, but that’s a matter of ethics — who has time for ethics on the Internet?

Experian Hitwise’s latest data shows there might be something to this strategy, as January 2011 boasted high success rates for searches on Bing and Yahoo. More than 81% of searches made on either site ended in a visit to a website in the results, compared to 65% for Google.

In January, Bing accounted for 27.44% of all U.S. searches in January, a 6% gain month over month. Bing.com had a 21% increase in searches month over month (10.% to 12.8%), but search.yahoo.com dropped by 4% (15.17% to 14.62%). Google’s share of the search market fell from 70% to 68%, while 70 other search engines accounted for 4.61% of U.S. searches.

Even though I think it’s a meaningless prize, I was still hoping it would go to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange (although Sarah Palin was seemingly omnipresent this year). Yeah, I cared a bit, and I’m guilty of my own end-of-year superlative poll (My publisher made me do it! All right — no, he didn’t.). So far, ADOTAS readers overwhelmingly think 2010 was the year Facebook overcame the media backlash (I was part of that!) to dominate not just social media, but the whole damn Internet and even a good deal of mobile.

Right on cue, competitive intelligence firm Hitwise has crowned Facebook the most visited site by U.S. browsers in 2010. Between January and November 2010, trips to the social network accounted for 8.93% of all website hits. Previous champion Google sheepishly took second place with 7.19% of all visits, and Yahoo! Mail came in third with 3.52%, followed by Yahoo.com at 3.3%.

In 2009, Facebook was trailing Google and Yahoo! Mail with 4.26% of all visits, which was quite a step up from ninth place in 2008 — where it got even fewer visits than MySpace. Wow, times change quickly.

So maybe Zuck does deserve person of the year as Facebook’s resilience and domineering would seem to be the story of 2010… But wait — there’s still another day left in this year! Every U.S. Internet browser, stop going to Facebook and visit Google.com RIGHT NOW! Come on, we can win this for Big G just like we won “Dancing With the Stars” for Bristol Palin!

Wait — she didn’t win? But I thought she was such a natural talent, especially since she was tragically born with two left feet. Wait, she doesn’t have two left feet? (Well, not literally…)

For the record, I think 2010 was the year online video advertising came of age — targeting became a reality and brands truly fell into the fold. However, I think that was only the spark — we’ll see the explosion in 2011.

Maher was most recently president of HitWise and participated in the executive team that sold the company to Experian in 2007. Engaging more than 1,500 clients, Maher was responsible for global operations and financial performance in the U.S., Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Prior to Hitwise, he served as vice president of sales at Jupiter Media Metrix.

In joining eBureau, Maher plans to assist in scaling eBureau’s predictive analytics technology into new industries and markets.

“We have an enormous market opportunity in front of us, and Chris is a proven leader in scaling organizations and revenue,” Meyer said. “His management experience and knowledge of online markets will be a great asset to us.”

More changes are in store for eBureau in 2010 — the company is planning to open offices in New York and San Francisco.

The microblogging (and search) site sent nearly one in five downstream visits to social Networks, and one in five to entertainment websites, according to Hitwise. The top social nets visited after Twitter were Facebook and MySpace, followed by the Twitter search page and YouTube, traffic analysis reveals. The top Entertainment websites were Twitpic, YouTube and Flickr.

John Battelle likened Twitter to a real time, conversational search engine, one of the reasons he felt Goolge better buy it soon.

Heather Hopkins, Hitwise senior Online Analyst, says that it is being used as a social network and means of distributing content. “Twitter’s clickstream differs markedly from search engines in that relatively little traffic goes to retail websites and Education (i.e. Wikipedia). It is also different from Email in that less traffic goes to Dating websites and again, to retail and Business and Finance websites.”

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The chronic decline marks the first drop in etailing since June of 2007. From June through August, visits to Hitwise’s Retail 500 Index went up 14% year-over-year. Music, computers and tickets are the seeing the worst dropoffs – 21%, 18% and 15%, respectively.

“These declines have strong implications for the upcoming online holiday season as well as offline sales,” Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise, said. “Everyone is aware of the role that the Internet plays to influence offline sales through research, so this slowdown may indicate a further ripple effect in sales in retail locations.”

Some of the data released by Hitwise included: The Print category increased by 23% during the week in question with the most visited site being The New York Times, which received 5% of the market share of the visits. Other top rated sites included People.com with 3% of the visits and The Washington Post with 2%.

New York magazine experienced a 336% increase that week with the posting of the Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe pictorial. Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise stated “The photos of Lindsay Lohan portraying Marilyn Monroe sparked considerable interest from online users last week. Although the battle for the presidential nominations is clearly top of mind for many, celebrity news provides a refuge for less-heated debates.”

According to company stats, visits to the Hitwise Retail 100 Index, which includes major brands like Walmart, Best Buy and Amazon, were up 11.8 percent from last year and up 33.9 percent compared to Thanksgiving 2004.

Still, sales on Black Friday, as it’s known in the industry, were up only 2.7 percent from the previous year according to Hitwise stats.

But Bill Trancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, takes the half-full view of the situation. “Traditionally, retailers have looked to Black Friday sales figures as a way of predicting the upcoming holiday season,” Trancer said in a statement. “The Hitwise Retail 100 index provides insight into both online and offline retail activity and with an 11.8 percent increase over the previous year is a very positive indication for the upcoming month.”

The Hitwise US Consumer Generated Media Report looks at social networking, photo sharing, and online video. Social networking monolith MySpace came out on top, raking in 82% of the traffic generated by the top 20 social sites, up 51% since March. Other networks like Bolt, Bebo, Gaia Online, and Google’s Orkut also experienced phenomenal growth.

“This report shows how influential the creation and consumption of user content has become as a web activity, and demonstrates its significance in driving web traffic to other categories,” said LeeAnn Prescott, Hitwise’s director of research in a statement.

The study also tracked social networking’s influence on non-social sites, reporting that 2.4% of visitors to shopping and classified websites came from MySpace, which also increased traffic for telecom, banks and travel sites.

Stats for photo hosting sites like PhotoBucket and Flickr also saw increases since March, while visits to video sharing site YouTube shot up 249%, making it the 26th most visited domain in the month of September.

“The use of social networking, photo hosting, and online video websites represent a significant shift in online user behavior,” added Prescott. “Hitwise Clickstream data is particularly useful in understanding how these users are interacting with the web.”

The video ads will be comprised of banner ads, promotions and sponsorships, and will coexist amongst the subtle text and graphical ads that YouTube currently offers.

According to stats from measurement firm Hitwise, YouTube has absorbed nearly one-third of the US online video audience, doubling the numbers reaped by MySpace and tripling those of Google.

For better or for worse, YouTube’s first experiment with its new advertising model will entail a partnership with Warner Music Group for the launch of the Paris Hilton Channel, which will promote the socialite’s debut album. Paris TV will be the first of what YouTube deems Brand Channels, which aim to distill advertiser brand names within the YouTube community.

Advertisers will thereby be allowed to customize the channels and create subscriptions so viewers are alerted whenever new videos are added to the channel. Fox hit “Prison Break” will peculiarly be among the first sponsors, seeing as its parent company News Corp also owns MySpace–YouTube’s video archrival.

Also available to interested advertisers is the Participatory Video Ad, a user-engaged video unit that allows consumers to rate, share, comment and embed advertising content that they find interesting on their own pages.

YouTube currently offers up over 100 million video showings daily.

With 29% of the of the country’s multimedia market, YouTube is now the leading ‘Net video download site in the US according to traffic monitor Hitwise.

YouTube claimed that in June, the site saw more than 2.5 billion views of its videos, which range from user-generated amateur and comical clips to mainstream broadcasts from the likes of NBC.

YouTube said that its videos account for 60% of all videos watched online in the US. It has almost 20 million visitors to the site each month, Nielsen/NetRatings reports.
Since videos are watched for free on the site, the company is now working on developing advertising and other revenue-generating strategies to support the business.

As for the other players in the online video market, Hitwise reports that MySpace accounts for a 19% share of the market, with Yahoo, MSN, Google and AOL trailing substantially with 3 to 5% of the video search market.