Web Visitors Swarm Google ChromeWeb Visitors Swarm Google Chrome

Google's Chrome ranked 12th for traffic among software Web sites the first day it was released, according to a Web intelligence company.

As news of Chrome spread through major news outlets on Tuesday, the number of visits to Google Chrome surpassed visits to one of its browser competitors, Mozilla, Hitwise reported. However, traffic to the site did not exceed visits to Microsoft's download center, Adobe, Symantec, or Apple.

Of 2,553 Web sites in Hitwise's Computers & Internet -- Software category, Google ranked 12th. On average, visitors spent two minutes and 48 seconds on the site, Hitwise said.

Hitwise reported that Google sent most of the traffic (79%) to Google Chrome, and search engines, overall, drove most of the traffic. Web sites in the software category and news and media sites also sent substantial traffic to Google Chrome.

Gmail and Facebook ranked in the top 5 Web sites referring visits to Google Chrome in several countries in the Asia-Pacific region, according to Alan Long, regional director of research for Hitwise.

In the United Kingdom, Google Chrome ranked 5th for market share of visits to software sites. Microsoft, Mozilla, Adobe, and Symantec held the top four spots, according to Hitwise.

In the United States, one surprising source of traffic was rap star 50 Cent's Web site, ThisIs50.com, which ranked among the top 10 referring sites, which Hitwise Director of Research Heather Dougherty believes probably came from a link in readers' comments.

Now that the Google home page has a link to Google Chrome, Dougherty predicts that the link will become a major traffic driver.