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Google, Yahoo and MSN took a 2.7, 1.7 and 1.1 per cent share of internet traffic respectively of visits during the week ending May 29th adding up to a total share of 5.5 percent. The search engine category as a whole took 13.8 per cent of visits.

At the same time all the many hundreds of 'adult' sites added together accounted for 18.8 per cent of visits that week. Put another way, almost one in five of all internet sites visited are classified as 'adult'.

Given, the kind of runaway evaluations of Google being floated around at the moment, it is clear, if it wasn't before, that online porn is a very big business indeed.

Elsewhere, Hitwise found that the Entertainment category accounted for 8.0 percent of visits, Business and Finance, 7.4 percent and Shopping and Classifieds at 7 percent.

Hitwise generates its reports from traffic generated from the most popular ISPs. My monitoring where the traffic from the ISPs is actually going, rather than aggregating individual surfer behaviour, it says it can generate an accurate picture of the total internet traffic.