Hitwise UK has published research regarding the most popular website and most-searched terms.

Hitwise UK has just announced the top 10 retail, food & beverage, and government websites for 2008 – and has revealed the most searched-for personality was Martin Lewis, of moneysavingexpert.com.

According to the Experian-owned website company, Lewis received 11% more searches than US President Barack Obama, who came second out of all searches over the twelve-week period ending 3 January 2009.

Lewis’ website, www.moneysavingexpert.com, was the 100th most-visited site in the UK during January, and its forums the 10th most popular out of social networking sites.

Popular travel-related search terms included ‘cheap holidays’ and ‘cheap flights’, while the most popular financial search terms were ‘exchange rates’ and ‘currency converter’, as Hitwise UK suggested: “As people prepared for their cheap winter holidays and the pound continued to fall.”

Richard Seymour, Hitwise UK Client Intelligence Analyst, explained the research: “Looking at the top 1500 search terms used across all search engines during the last quarter of 2008, we pulled out all the non-branded terms and attached a subject area to them. For example, ‘football’ was labelled as sport, ‘tv guide’ as TV, ‘oasis’ as music and so on.

“The resulting pattern shows that we are a nation of TV lovers and online gaming nuts! TV was our largest subject area with 14.2% of all non-branded searches, and followed closely behind by Games (of the online variety – not video games bought for consoles or PC’s) with 13.9%. Travel, Sport and Finance completed the top 5 subjects searched for across all engines.”

Overall, Hitwise UK research revealed that one in seven non-branded UK internet searches is for a TV personality or programme, and one in every 16 is music-related. To find out more about the research, visit Hitwise’s website to read the guest blog by Richard Seymour: www.hitwise.co.uk

Hitwise UK provides daily statistics and research about how the UK’s eight million internet users interact with the websites of more than 165 industries.