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. …

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….

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! …

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 …