By a 16,000-visitor nose!

Google Sites inched ahead of Microsoft Sites, becoming the most-visited web property in Canada in January — by a mere 16,000 or so unique visitors — according to data from comScore's Media Metrix service, MarketingCharts writes.

Google Sites had 22.440 million visitors and Microsoft Sites had 22.424 million, comScore said.

Additional January information released:

Top 25 Properties

Among the highlights:

• Yahoo Sites were third with 16,481 unique visitors.
• E-commerce properties eBay and Amazon ranked fifth and ninth, respectively.
• Facebook.com held the No. 4 position, as it had in Dec. '07.

Top 10 Gaining Site Categories

Among the highest-growth categories:

• Tax sites, up 44 percent
• Health-related sites - retail healthcare (34 percent) and health information (19 percent)
• Travel-related sites - hotels/resorts (32 percent) and online travel agents (22 percent)

Career services and development properties also had significant growth (26 percent), with job sites like Monster, Workopolis, and JobBank (see below) powering the growth.

Top 10 Gaining Properties

Among the highlights:

• Two travel sites, Softvoyage.com (53 percent growth) and Expedia Inc (30 percent), made the Top 10 list.
• The Canada Revenue Agency website had 2.339 million visitors, compared with 1.691 million in Dec. '07.

About the data: comScore ranked top properties by total unique visitors from home and work locations, using information gathered from its Media Metrix service. These findings exclude traffic from public computers such as internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.