Netscape Communications Corp, moving fast to shore up its still impressive but dwindling share of web traffic, will barely have time to take a glance at RelevantKnowledge Inc’s latest monthly survey. But if it does it will see that, according to the research company’s panel-based survey, it was the main loser in terms of unique visitors to its site, although it remains in second place. The main winner among the top flight was aol.com, which jumped from fifth to third. RelevantKnowledge tracks the habits of home, business and college users who have agreed to participate in its survey via a Java- based application installed on their computer. From it the company then projects the survey results across what it believes is the entire US web audience – about 57 million – based on its recent estimates, which used a combination of traffic software, phone interviews and US census information (CI No 3,403). For the month of April, Yahoo/Four11 got 32.87 million; Netscape 21.11 million; AOL 19.73 million; Excite (including Webcrawler) 19.20 million; and Microsoft 18.8 million. Of those five, Yahoo/Four11, Excite/Webcrawler and Microsoft were pretty static, while Netscape fell just under 10% and AOL rose by just over 11%.
