At the end of August, Google was the top U.S. search engine for sending traffic to shopping and classifieds sites.

Traffic from Google accounted for 14.93 percent of U.S. visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ended August 26, according to Hitwise. Yahoo search was second, accounting for 4.69 percent, and MSN Search was third with 2.33 percent. Social networking site MySpace.com accounted for 2.53 percent of all U.S. upstream visits to Shopping and Classifieds, up from only 1.28 percent six months earlier.

"Search is a proven method of…driving online retail site traffic," said Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise, adding: "With the growth of MySpace and others, online retailers should expand their focus beyond search to consider social networking sites as a source of additional traffic."

In the past six months, the market share of visits to MySpace.com has increased 67 percent among all websites; MySpace.com captured 4.88 percent of all U.S. visits for the week ended August 26. The top Shopping and Classifieds websites visited immediately after MySpace for that week were eBay, Amazon.com, Gateway, Walmart.com and Craigslist.

The top three brand search terms in the Shopping and Classifieds category for the week were eBay, Craigslist and Walmart. The top three product search terms were Barbie, iPod and Heelys.