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Six weeks after launching, the demographic make-up of people who are visiting Google's new social network Google Plus is changing to become less focused on early adopters than it was at launch, says leading web traffic monitoring company Experian Hitwise, which posted the results of a 10 million person tracking study today.

It will be very interesting to see how the graph below looks some time after yesterday's launch of Games on Google Plus. The use of arbitrary terminology in the graph below is a little confusing, but the simple version is: Google Plus is now more popular among suburban parents and well-off empty nesters than it is among the College and Cafe crowd.

The Internet may feel U.S.-centric today, but there's a big and rapidly connecting world out there. Leading Web-traffic monitoring service Experian Hitwise announced today the launch of its newest venue: Hitwise China.

Hitwise is great about publishing timely tidbits about Web statistics and I look forward to seeing U.S., global and China stats contrasted. The first offering along those lines? Hitwise says that microblogging is more common in China than it is in the U.K., U.S., France, Canada, Australia or India. Sina Micro blog, the leading Chinese microblogging service, sees one out of every 158 website visits in China, Hitwise observed last month. That's more than 3.5 times as large a Web market share as Twitter has here in the US. That sounds like a good market to go monitor.

In continuing to look at the way that Facebook has become a driving force behind online news consumption, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has dove into the numbers again, this time examing how Facebook users compare with others in return visits.

According to Hopkins' article, Facebook not only drives a high amount of traffic, higher than Google News, but its users are far more loyal, as well.

Google still dominates the search market in in the U.S., while Bing, Yahoo and Ask lost a small slice of the market in December. According to the latest data from Hitwise, Google's market share continues to hover around 72%. Yahoo now owns 14.83% of the search market and Bing accounted for 8.92% of all U.S. searches. Hitwise also looked at the success rates for the top search engines. Hitwise defines this as "the percentage of executed searches that result in a visit to a site other than a main search domain." Here, Bing used to trail Yahoo and Google by a significant margin, but is now on par with Google.

As we reported Thanksgiving Day, web searches and traffic for online retailers during the holidays were significantly down as compared to previous years, according to research from Experian Hitwise.

However, this Black Friday showed a 4 percent increase in site visits versus Thanksgiving Day traffic - a stat that usually falls between those two days. The retail site that got the lion's share of traffic this year was Amazon.com, which netted 13.55 percent of the traffic seen by the top 500 retail websites. Read on for a few surprising stats that might signal changes in the U.S. economy - and changes in how U.S. consumers will be doing their holiday shopping.

Hitwise, a web traffic analytics firm that often publishes fun and interesting stats on issues of the day, looks today at how threatened Facebook's growth might be by Twitter. The company's conclusion: Twitter is no threat at all.

Traffic to Twitter is declining, Hitwise General Manager of Global Research Bill Tancer writes, while Facebook's growth continues to go through the roof. Facebook is approaching ubiquity, while Twitter's appeal is narrow and its average registered user is totally unengaged. "That being said," Tancer writes, "I still plan to tweet this entry."

After months of slow but steady increases in its market share, Bing's share of the search market in the US and globally fell for the first time in September. According to StatCounter's Global Stats, Bing's share of the search market in the US fell from 9.64% in August to 8.51% last month. Globally, Bing didn't fare much better, as it went from 3.58% to 3.25%. Yahoo's share went from 10.5% in August to only 9.4% in September. The combined share of Bing and Yahoo has now fallen to 17.91%.

Yesterday, Google announced that it was expanding its real estate listings on Google Maps. In an interview with The Age, Andrew Foster, a Google product manager, explained that Google was rededicating itself to this market because it found that a growing number of people are using the Internet to search for a new home. Currently, according to data from Hitwise, Google Maps is only a very small player in the online real estate market and it only sends about 2% of its traffic to real estate web sites. The current market leaders are Realtor.com, Zillow, and Yahoo Real Estate.

According to the latest data from Hitwise, paid search traffic has taken a major hit in the last year. While, according to Hitwise, about 9.84% of the search engine traffic it registered in April 2008 came from paid clicks, in the four weeks preceding May 9, 2009, this number declined by 26% to 7.25%. Hitwise registered this trend across all of the categories it tracks, with the sole exception of paid traffic to site in its education category, where paid search results increased slights from 1.39% to 1.45%.

Oprah's well publicized first tweet on Friday was definitely a boon for Twitter. According to Hitwise, 37% of all visits to Twitter last Friday were from new visitors, and Twitter's overall share of U.S. Internet visits increased 24% on Friday. It is important to note, though, that Twitter, being the new and growing service that it is, usually gets about 32% new visitors every day, which definitely puts these numbers into perspective. Hitwise, however, also notes that Facebook's ratio of new visitors was only 8% in March.