Microsoft Shows Google Who's Daddy

Forget search for a minute because Microsoft's consistently third place there. As a parent company, Microsoft websites beat Google sites in both unique audience and time per person, says Nielsen//NetRatings.

Nielsen divided up the numbers according to parent company and brand. Microsoft-owned sites brought in a unique home and work audience of over 121 million people who spent over 2 hours and 7 minutes on the sites.

Google was the nearest competitor (YouTube lending a hand no doubt), drawing in 117 million visitors to its properties in July for 1 hour and 34 minutes.

But in terms of time spent only, Time Warner and Yahoo leave their other rivals looking like hit-it-and-quit-it types. Time Warner kept its 104 million visitors around for over four hours and 5 minutes, aided for certain by AOL Instant Messenger. Yahoo's 111 million unique visitors stayed at Yahoo properties for nearly 3 hours.

Don't count out News Corp. or eBay either. With MySpace's help, News Corp. clocked 76 million visitors for 2 hours and 26 minutes. eBay was visited by 68 million people in July for 1 hour and 44 minutes.

Everyone else in the top 10 list, which includes (in order) InterActive Corp., the parent company of Ask.com, and Amazon, Wikimedia, and the New York Times Company came in distantly behind, logging between 44 million and 61 million visitors for between 15 and 22 minutes.

If whittled down to just brand name, however, Google barely edges out Yahoo in terms of unique audience (111.6 million versus 110.4 million), but Yahoo trounces Google in time spent per person (2 hours 59 minutes versus 1 hour and eight minutes).

Google fans have argued in the past however that Google is not a portal but