According to Nielsen / Netratings, Google gained almost six percentage points in search market share from 12/04 – 12/05.

The Nielsen/NetRatings organization, long known and prized for its ratings systems announced a new way to track ratings and figuring in the folks who toss their cookies. They’ve been testing the method in the U.S. and using it in Australia and Italy.

A story from the Associated Press has some great sound bites from mainstream media and others about RSS.

With the proliferation of the search engine industry into everyday life, a number of institutions now measure the growth of search, much like you would test for television ratings.

Ever since GetFirefox.com has met the minimum requirements to be monitored by Nielsen//NetRatings, which occurred in June of last year, the browser’s site experienced a 237% spike of unique visitors.

According to a Nielsen//Netratings study, Google holds the top spot for search engine destinations. However, if you take a closer look at N//N’s findings, you see that Yahoo and MSN share the second and third positions, respectively. Because MSN search is still using Overture to serve their search results more people are vicariously using the Yahoo method of search than they do Google.

Recently, WebProNews featured an article discussing how Google was allowing Froogle ads to appear in the first paid position of their search result page. Google acknowledged, to Andy Beal, that they were indeed promoting Froogle by placing it within the paid listing area.

A report on online shopping rankings by Nielsen/NetRatings indicates that online auction house eBay leads in the number of visitors to its site. Not only that, but eBay also leads, by a huge margin, for the amount of time visitors spent on a shopping site.

Yahoo’s purchase of Kelkoo, Europe’s largest online comparison-shopping service, has increased the amount of European visitors the web portal’s site by 12%.

Nielsen//NetRatings recently reported that 1 in 3 Americans use search engines in their daily lives. This means that over 76% of the online population uses one of many available search engines in their day-to-day browsing.