U.S. visits to Craigslist were up 93 percent year over year last week and in the Hitwise Classifieds category Craiglist properties, grew 137 percent. The site ranked #23 last week based on share of U.S. Internet visits, up two spots from a month ago and six spots from three months ago.

Craigslist Traffic Graph
(Photo Credit: Hitwise )

Hitwise attributes the growth partly to increased awareness of Craigslist. Heather Hopkins writes," The search term ‘craigslist’ was the fourth highest volume search term last week, based on share of US Internet searches, beat out only by ‘myspace’, ‘ebay’ and ‘myspace.com’. The search term accounted for one in every 357 queries last week. Searches for ‘craigslist’ overtook searches for ‘youtube’ in September and for ‘mapquest’ in July."

Hopkins says that Craigslist popularity is increasing beyond California were the site was launched and is spreading into newer states. She writes," Last year, the second largest state, in share of US visits to Craigslist.org was Washington accounting for 5% of visits, followed by Oregon and New York."

"This year, the second largest state was Texas, followed by Florida and New York. US Visits to Craigslist.org from Texas were up 31% and from Florida up 67%. This indicates that growth is being fueled by increasing popularity of Craigslist in newer cities."
 

We’re in no way criticizing the chart-making abilities of Heather Hopkins, mind you; Hitwise UK’s vice president of research simply constructed something that made it easy to compare Mahalo and ChaCha.  As a result, Mahalo’s growth since July of 2007 approached something akin to a 45-degree angle.

But the top of the chart is equal to a 0.0025 percent market share, and so Hopkins herself writes, "Mahalo ranked 69th last week among Search Engines and received 0.02% of all US Internet visits to Search Engines compared with Google’s 55.52%."

Remember all the hoopla when Mahalo launched?  Perhaps only (the still-private) Powerset has made waves as big as those.  So the Mahalo data helps demonstrate how difficult it is to break into the search market, and the ChaCha stats only further prove the point – its market share has dipped down to 0.00029 percent.

Meanwhile, it was only two days ago that Hitwise reported Google’s new high of 65.98 percent.

Hitwise authority Heather Hopkins writes, “Last week, there were more than two and a half times more US Internet searches for ‘one laptop per child’ than for ‘laptop’.  It was the top search term that included the word ‘laptop’ last week though it still trailed the higher volume search term ‘laptops’.”

Granted, those searches don’t necessarily translate into purchases; Hopkins (as well as just about every news outlet with which I’m familiar) has documented that the American economy isn’t exactly in a robust state this holiday season, and the DJIA is down another $211 today.

Yet Hopkins reveals, “The top website visited after laptop.org last week was laptopfoundation.org – to which the ‘participate’ link leads from laptop.org.”  And that’s a pretty good sign that people are indeed putting money towards the project.

It wouldn’t be surprising if a few more dollars are spent on Thanksgiving, either.