IE seems to have finally staunched the Firefox incursion, according to Nielsen's latest NetRatings for pcworld.co.nz. When we last checked in, during November, Mozilla Firefox was continuing its seemingly inexorable march, climbing to 30.72%, while Microsoft's IE dropped, again, from 65.94% mid 2006 to 62.8%.

But for the week ending 02 Feb 07, the browser breakdown shows IE actually rising slightly, while the Fox falls fractionally - a big contrast to its leaps and bounds last year.

Internet Explorer's comeback is built around IE 7, which has doubled in popularity to know account for 25.79% of this site's traffic.

Apple's Safari browser usually falls in the gaggle of cult browsers that register less than 1%, but the recent wild popularity of iPhone stories on pcworld.co.nz lately seems to have drawn a few Mac-heads.

Browser: - % of unique visitors to pcworld.co.nz
Microsoft Internet Explorer: 63.45%
Mozilla Firefox: 30.71%
Opera Software Opera: 2.25%
Apple Safari: 1.74%

Hit me baby one more time
As ever, Nielsen showed that most people who came to pcworld.co.nz via search engines come from Google. Its dominance is so extreme that the second-placed source is Yahoo, on a measly 2.55%.

The top 10 search phrases that landed people on pcworld.co.nz for the week ending 21 January 07 were:
1. iphone
2. irql not less or equal
3. zero g registry
4. britney spears
5. britney spears no underwear
6. britney-spears
7. sysdata.xml
8. comet mcnaught
9. pc world
10. apple iphone

This is quite a diffuse field, I should add, with no term bar 'iphone' accounting for more than 1% of traffic that landed on pcworld.co.nz from search engines overall.

I should add that salacious Britney seekers actually landed on a relatively benign blog entry.
Similarly, in the week ending 02 Feb a small army of Lindsay Lohan stalkers got to learn little about Intel's wireless strategy.
Yes, I am bad. Though not in the way some Google surfers would like.