Nielsen is always slaving away to find out what’s hot and what the latest trends tell us about consumer behavior. This time they were looking at who the top online brands were in the United States.

They also examined who the top travel brands were from online search. As with many studies on popular culture, the results are not really a surprise.

Who came out on top? Of course, Google did, and in more ways than one. Obviously they won for search, but they were also the most clicked on travel brand with their Google Maps site. As you can imagine, they were followed by MapQuest in the travel category, with Yahoo Local and TripAdvisor trailing very far behind.

As for the top US search brands it plays out as follows; Google, Facebook, Yahoo, MSN/WindowsLive/Bing, YouTube, Microsoft, AOL Media, Amazon, Wikipedia, then Apple. Again, nothing really comes as a surprise from that list.

The study was conducted in April of this year where the United States had 210 million active internet users. On average, people spent 29 hours online browsing during April. So that’s the latest word from Nielsen; we like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook.