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Researchers with Nielsen Netratings say American Internet surfers love
three types of Web sites - search engine, portal or community site.

The report released Monday by the Nielsen NetRatings Internet survey firm
says one out of every three Americans will visit one of these types of
sites on a religious-like basis.

"These sites have established themselves as a mandatory part of every
surfers' online habits," says NetRatings vice president of eCommerce
Sean Kaldor. "Nine out of every ten Web users go to such a site every
month, and are going there more frequently - nearly five times
monthly."

Which means that nearly 95 million people spend a large portion of
their day at sites like AOL (Nasdaq: AOL) Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) or
Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) MSN properties. The top three properties
also commanded the most amount of time, with surfers spending an
average of an hour and a half in and around the site.

Telecommunications and Internet service sites follow a distant second,
attracting nearly 70 percent of the Web population or 72 million
surfers.

"Telecommunications and Internet services sites continue to play a
significant role in daily Web usage as well, growing faster than
search engines and portals," says Kaldor. "Key to their growth has
been the overwhelming success of free e-mail services. Companies,
which have aligned themselves in both of these, top two categories,
such as MSN and Yahoo! among others, are ideally positioned to
dominate surfer mind-share and wallet-share."

The entertainment category followed closely behind telecommunications
with 69 million people or 67 percent of Web surfers.

"Despite the decline in traffic to Napster, the overall entertainment
category continues to be robust, ranking as the third most visited
category for home surfer," says Kaldor.

Nielsen Netratings based the rankings on audience measurement of
people who have access to the Internet at-home and at-work.