WebProNews

Searchers swimming downstream on the currents of the Internet, via the queries they make on Google, fuel significant percentages of some industry verticals.

Shopping, news & media, and entertainment sites receive nice chunks of traffic from Google. Measurement firm Hitwise said those verticals gather upwards of 14 percent of their upstream traffic from the big search engine.

Inside the health & medical and travel verticals, Google occupies a much bigger portion of the traffic seen on those sites. Hitwise found double digit percentage increases year over year in the Google traffic flowing in those directions.

Travel sites found 25.6 percent of visitors heading in from Google in July 2008. That represented a massive 23 percent increase from July 2007.

Health & medical sites found even greater numbers arriving via Google's search machine. They picked up 31.4 percent of their traffic courtesy of Google, up 9 percent year over year.

The heavier percentage of traffic from Google likely reflects its ever-increasing share of the search engine market. In the US, Hitwise found Google closing in on 71 percent of the searches performed, while Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask all ceded share in July.