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Amazon UK is a giant in its own right, but it turns out that the retailer owes a good portion of its traffic (around 25 percent) to Google.  And with one good deed deserving another, Amazon sends around ten percent of its visitors straight back to the search engine.

These statistics come courtesy of Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins, who analyzed Amazon UK’s traffic in a recent blog post.  In a broad sense, it may be useful to know that “Amazon.co.uk is the second most visited retail website after eBay UK based on UK internet visits and ranks #15 overall, just behind BBC.co.uk and ahead of YouTube,” according to Hopkins.

It seems that books have bested grainy videos, then, but Amazon’s traffic may be due to its other wares, as well.  “We’re often asked how much of Amazon’s traffic is books related and how much is electronics or other,” notes Hopkins.  “We can’t say for sure.  Because of the complexity of the site’s structure, it is near impossible to separate books from the rest.”

Yet the top term that sent visits to Amazon UK during the first part of July was “books,” and the second, “giles wareing,” is the main character of a novel.  As you might have expected, “harry potter” was also on the list (though I was surprised to see the boy wizard all the way down in seventh position, especially given an earlier report concerning Emma Watson’s popularity).

One strange thing about Hopkins’s report: somehow this may all be related to the entity formerly known as British Telecom - that’s where about 2.5 percent of people go after visiting Amazon UK.