WebProNews

While Google remains dominant in search there is one area it has not been able to take the top spot.

Hitwise has an interesting analysis about how Google Maps was close to catching MapQuest in share of U.S. Internet visits a few weeks ago.

Heather Hopkins says that in late December Google Maps was on track to overtake MapQuest but last week MapQuest had distanced itself by 11 percent over Google Maps, up from 1.6 percent in the first week of January.

So how did Google Maps come so close to overtaking MapQuest? Hopkins explains, "The ascent of Google Maps is a result of the shortcut in the search results on Google. 61% of visits to Google Maps came directly from Google last week. Yahoo! Search was the site's #2 referrer of traffic and accounted for only 1.07% of US visits. Google Maps received visits from 72,074 unique search terms in the past four weeks, compared to 11,466 for MapQuest."

MapQuest receives the majority of it search traffic from people actively searching for the brand name MapQuest. Hopkins writes," In the past four weeks 8 of the top 10 search terms sending visits to MapQuest were queries for the brand name, such as 'mapquest', 'map quest' and 'mapquest driving directions.' These 8 terms accounted for 62% of visits from search to the MapQuest website."