Yesterday’s press release covered how Google’s share of executed searches was 64% in March 2007, an increase of 10% versus March 2006. Here at Hitwise have seen search engines, and Google in particular, become a more important source of traffic for many websites and industry categories. The second table in the release lists key industry categories and increases in their share of traffic from search engines and Google. For instance, the Shopping & Classifieds category received 5.99% more upstream traffic from search engines from March 2006 to March 2007, it received 14.24% more traffic from Google. Thus, Google is growing faster as a source of traffic for sites in these categories than other search engines are. The chart below illustrates this increase nicely:

The increases in the share of traffic from Google over the past year is not surprising considering that market share of visits to Google (not including other Google properties such as image search or news) has grown to 4.52% of all Internet visits in March 2007, an increase of 18% since March 2006. There are no signs of Google slowing down anytime soon.

According to the company’s press release, WGC-5 BoD at its Monday meeting has adopted a decision to extend the deadline for minority shareholders of Konakovskaya GRES to swap their shares for shares in WGC-5. The terms of the offer remain unchanged. Shareholders of Konakovskaya GRES can swap 1 common share in this utility for 19 common shares in WGC-5.

Initially, WGC-5 planned to close the registration of share swap bids from minority shareholders of Konakovskaya GRES on August 26. However, as of August 22, owners of over 5% in GRES, largely individuals, voiced their aspiration to swap shares, while large investors had failed to make up their minds yet. As a result, a group of shareholders of Konakovskaya GRES (owns over 15% in the power plant), including Prosperity Capital Management, Halcyon Advisors and Firebird petitioned UES and WGC-5 to extend the share swap offer.

WGC-5 was established as UES’ 100% subsidiary and includes Reftinskaya, Sredneuralskaya (both are not JSCs), Nevinnomysskaya and Konakovskaya TPPs. According to expert estimates, the market value of WGC-5 is $1.5-2.5 bln.