January marks the first time Wikipedia has made the top ten list of most popular Web sites in the U.S.

In a report from comScore Networks, the online encyclopedia officially came in ninth with 42.9 million unique visitors last month, just behind Ask Network with 49 million and ahead of The New York Times (#10). This is a significant improvement over last January where it languished in 33rd place with 18.3 million unique visitors.

Much of Wikipedia’s recent U.S. success may be attributed to some generosity from Google. A report from Hitwise indicates that Google traffic to Wikipedia is up 166% Year over Year. The analysis showed that for the week ending Feb 10, 2007, 70% of Wikipedia’s upstream visits came from search engines – 50% from Google alone.

The …

We reported back in December that Google Blog Search had surpassed Technorati in market share of US Internet visits visits during the week ending 12/23/06. This was based on data from a Hitwise analysis that drew considerable attention from many prominent insight sources. However, a study performed at Compete.com reports findings entirely opposite to those results.

Compete performed the same analysis, but came up with a different conclusion with their data. Compete determined that Technorati continues to hold a significant lead over Google Blog Search.

Both analysts agree that Google Blog Search’s recent traffic surge was associated with a well-placed link to Google Blog Search added to the Google News Homepage back in October. This action failed to propel Google past Technorati as the leading blog search according to Compete.

The …

According to a recent study by Hitwise, Yahoo! Answers is dominating all of the pure Q&A websites by capturing 96.1 percent of the US market. The nearest competitor was Answerbag with 2.1%, while the remaining competitors garnered less than 1% of the market share.

Wikipedia still has the lead in the Education – Reference category, receiving a commanding 1/5 of the visits, with Yahoo! Answers ranking #2.

The study also found that Yahoo! Answers was the 100th most visited domain out of over 500,000 websites tracked by Hitwise. 52% of visitors to Yahoo! Answers were female and 22% were between the ages of 18 and 24.

Yahoo! Answers received 53% of its traffic from search engines which was nearly evenly split between Yahoo! Search and Google. This traffic consisted of 42,087 search terms with the leading search term, “yahoo answers”, capturing only 0.59% …

According to Internet traffic-monitoring firm Hitwise, the number of visits to Google Blog Search has surpassed visits to Technorati for the week ending 12/23/06.

Google Blog Search was introduced in September 2005 and experienced some trouble finding an audience. However, October marked a significant increase in Google Blog Search traffic when Google placed a link to Blog Search on the Google News home page. This action resulted in a 168% surge in market share for Google Blog Search over a two week period and positioned the Search tool as a serious threat to Technorati. Since then, approximately 60% of Google Blog Search’s traffic has been coming directly from Google News, compared to less than 1% before the change.

Hitwise also identified another interesting fact regarding Google Blog Search visitors. The Demographic data show that 34% of visitors to …