Hitwise reports on World Cup and professional soccer player-related searches.

Since the World Cup starts this week, Hitwise has taken a closer look at the top sites driving traffic to the official FIFA World Cup site and the top searched-for soccer players in the U.S. According to Hitwise data, based on a U.S. sample of 10 million internet users for the week ending June 3, 2006, Yahoo! sent the most traffic, 17 percent of visits, to the FIFA World Cup site-- the result of an official partnership. Google provided the second highest amount of traffic, sending 12.91 percent of visits, followed by FIFA.com with 12.56 percent. The Yahoo Partnership has been proven successful; Hitwise Clickstream data shows that more than 39 percent of traffic is coming from Yahoo websites. Five of the top-10 sites sending traffic to the official FIFA World Cup site were Yahoo sites. Former U.S. Women's team player Mia Hamm was the most searched-for soccer player for the week ending June 3, 2006. Trailing Hamm was Brazil's top player Ronaldhino, followed by his teammate Ronaldo, former Argentina great (Diego) Maradona and England's own, David Beckham.

Hitwise is the world's leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories. By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites.  Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation. Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.