A report released by Nielsen/NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research on Wednesday said that Internet surfers usually use search engines to navigate their way to the common websites rather than typing websites' URL into the address bar directly.

Nielson/NetRatings reports that "ebay" and "google" have become the two hottest key words for search after a one-month online survey over the netizens' habit of web surfing.

The report said that the five out of top ten key words for search are the websites that have the function of web searching, which verifies the statement that netizens are not confined to only one search engine. Statistics over the past months show that the top three most popular key words for searching remain the same, ebay, with 13.871 million requests leading the top ten search terms, followed by google and Yahoo!, with the requests of 13.301 million times and 7.997 million times respectively.

The top ten search terms (suffix number denotes the times of requests):

Ebay 13,871,000

Google 13,301,000

Yahoo! 7,997,000

Mapquest 7,431,000

Yahoo.com 6,528,000

Pogo.com 4,062,000

Ask jeeves 3,889,000

Walmart 3,688,000

Msn 3,155,000

Ebay.com 3,125,000

By People's Daily Online