eBay is most searched-for brand on the web, study says

Wal-Mart, the undisputed leader in retail sales, comes in third as a searched-for brand on the web – following eBay and eBay.com. Retail brands ranked 4-10 are Best Buy, Amazon.com, Home Depot, Target, Sears, Amazon and Circuit City, Hitwise reports in a study based on search activity during the four weeks ended Sept. 25.

EBay garnered 1.49% of all queries across major search engines that delivered traffic to shopping and classified sites, Hit wise says. In comparison, the term “Walmart” accounted for 0.28% of searches, Best Buy for 0.26%, Amazon.com for 0.24%, Home Depot for 0.24%, and Target for 0.22%.

Hitwise says the top 10 product terms used in Internet search, in rank order: sporting goods, Halloween costumes, consumer reports, books, used textbooks, furniture, auto parts, tires and flowers.

The largest share of Internet searches that resulted in visits to shopping and classified sites, 32.4%, used two words, Hitwise says. Searches with three words had a 23.7%; searches with one word had 19.6%.

It added that 56% of searches delivering traffic to apparel sites used one or two words, but that 58% of searches delivering traffic to automotive sites contained three or more words.

For the same week, Hitwise reports that eBay.com had the largest market share of site visits, at 24.71%, followed by:

My.eBay.com, 10.77%;
Amazon.com, 3.08%;
eBay Motors, 2.16%;
Dell, 1.63%;
eBay Stores, 1.27%;
Walmart.com, 1.25%;
Yahoo Shopping, 1.14%;
Target, 1.02%;
NexTag, 0.89%;
BestBuy.com, 0.88%;
BizRate.com, 0.72%;
Ticketmaster.com, 0.65%;
Sears.com, 0.61%;
CircuitCity.com, 0.59%;
Shopping.com, 0.57%;
JCPenney.com, 0.50%;
QVC.com, 0.49%;
Overstock.com, 0.48%;
SprintPCS.com, 0.47%;
HomeDepot.com, 0.46%;
eMachines.com, 0.42%;
Half.com, 0.40%;
Barnes & Noble.com, 0.37%.