E-mail still most popular kid on the block, but search engines catching up
By Matt Jansen
For what seems like ages in Internet years, e-mail has dominated the top spot in the list of most popular things to do online. Search engines are steadily gaining ground though as users satisfy their craving for information by typing in a brief set of keywords.
In 2002, about a third of all Internet users accessed search engines typically every day, but with steady increases that number has grown to 49% in 2008! That information is based on a report Pew Internet (PDF) released earlier today.
The report specifically points out that search engine use has pulled ahead of other activities like checking the news, but doesn’t indicate how many of those users are checking news by using search engines.
Here’s the breakdown:
Some common stereotypes are confirmed in the report such as affluent, younger users typically accessing search more. And that’s likely music to the ears of marketers looking to build brand awareness online by appealing to a viable potential customer base.
The upward trend in search could also be a symptom of common online applications like Gmail, YouTube, Google News, and Flickr tightly integrating search with their offerings. That’s causing an intersection between search and almost every other online activity, and people expect that functionality everywhere on the web.
There also seems to be a slight difference in how men and women approach search. Men seem more confident and generally aware of how search works online (i.e. sponsored results displaying alongside organic content).
Pew Internet emphasizes the ubiquity of search online also:
. . . users can now expect to find a high-performing, site-specific search engine on just about every content-rich website that is worth its salt. With a growing mass of web content from blogs, news sites, image and video archives, personal websites, and more, internet users have an option to turn not only to the major search engines, but also to search engines on individual sites, as vehicles to reach the information they are looking for.
Until another technology overtakes search as the best method available to organize information, its use will continue to grow.
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