Traffic to news websites has continued to rise amid signs that users hungry for war reports and analysis are rejecting TV in favour of the internet.

According to web monitoring company Hitwise, traffic to news sites has risen by 6% in the past two weeks following the huge surge that greeted the outbreak of hostilities.

While audiences for 24-hour TV news services have dipped as the war progresses, user figures on the internet have continued to increase.

Guardian Unlimited continues to be the most visited newspaper website in Britain, with a 7% market share last week, followed by FT.com, the Sun's site, Times Online and the Telegraph's site.

The BBC and CNN have also reported a dramatic rise in the number of users visiting their international sites over the past three weeks as overseas users log on.

Unofficial figures show there were 150 million visitors to the BBC's 43 World Service sites during the final two weeks of March - more than double the corresponding period in the previous month.

"The increased traffic to our online services is a reflection of the current appetite for information and a heightened interest in international affairs worldwide," said Nigel Chapman, the deputy director of BBC World Service.

The BBC World Service's new inter-

national site, BBCnews.com, received more than 130 million page impressions in March, compared with 72 million in February. Figures for its Arabic site shot up 150% to more than 15 million page impressions.

CNN said there had been huge growth on its international websites with the highest ever traffic on CNNArabic.com and its international site.

The main CNN.com site has also achieved record usage figures. Some 78 million users logged on over the weekend of March 22 and 23.

Despite being forced offline by hackers for much of the Iraq conflict, the website of Arab news channel al-Jazeera has also boosted its populartity dramatically since war broke out.

According to Hitwise, the site has shot up 63 places in the news service rankings.

Web portal Lycos said "al-Jazeera" became its most searched-for term last week, generating three times as many search requests as "sex".

Al-Jazeera drew intense interest from web users in the west after it broadcast pictures of dead and captive US soldiers in Iraq. American television networks had decided not to air footage of the corpses.

Google, the internet's leading search engine, said the term "al-Jazeera" showed the greatest increase in the week ending March 31, although the company does not report absolute rankings of search terms.