92% of all searches in the U.S. were done through the top three engines: Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN/Windows LIve/Bing.

As the curtain fell on the World Cup and team and player performances were analyzed across the world, The Nielsen Company looked at how the official FIFA website performed across a number of countries that participated in the tournament.

Social media usage has seen unprecedented growth in Asia Pacific in the past year and is now one of the most critical trends in the online sector, according to Nielsen’s Asia Pacific Social Media Report.

A follow-up study by NM Incite, a Nielsen McKinsey Company, found that in the first two weeks of the tournament Adidas had overtaken Nike, accounting for 25.1% share of World Cup buzz online compared to 14.4% before the event. Nike, meanwhile, dropped from 30.2% to 19.4%.

After a weekend of two “blown” calls by referees in World Cup matches, Nielsen found that two out of three respondents (65 percent) to Nielsen’s online survey of 55 countries were in favor of a change. Only about one in 10 people globally said the ban on the use of video replays should stay, and the others didn’t mind either way.

New media. Old media. Consumer demographics. Consumer interests. An innovative media targeting model fuses the best of all worlds into a single, cross-platform view that controls for the most important variables influencing purchase.

When we look at smartphone data consumption distribution and year-over-year change, we see a large disparity of usage among smartphone users and are struck by the staggering amounts of data used by the heaviest users.

The size of the U.K. Internet audience grew from 36.9 million people in May 2009 to 38.8 million people in May 2010. Of these 1.9 million new Internet users, 1.0 million (53 percent) were at least 50 years old.

The U.S. team qualifying for the knockout stages of the World Cup has certainly captured the hearts and minds of Americans online, but not quite as much as their draw in the opening game with England.

There was little change in the US search market from April to May with Google still accounting for almost two-thirds share of all US searches (65.1%) in the month of May 2010.