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Nov. 12, 2007

Just who is using search and how are they doing it? Various data from Compete’s website based on click stream data enables us to dig into this question without having to worry about details like search bots, meta-search, etc.

Every search query seen in Compete's data is a query performed by an actual Internet user.

We began by taking a look at the overall search query segment with respect to volumes of queries performed by the U.S. online population.

We are all well aware that the Internet world is full of examples of the now infamous “long tail search query.” Overall, query volumes are no exception.

Compete.com ranked individual searchers by the volume of queries performed in any given month, and then it aggregated their searches into percentiles.

What observers can see is that the top 1 percent of searchers performed a about 13 percent of all searches in any given month.

If we extend this to the top 20 percent the number of queries increase to about 70 percent. In contrast to the well-known 80-20 ratio it appears that in Internet search there is roughly a 70-20 distribution instead of the usual 80-20 that most people would expect.

Instead, let's seperate this data one-by-one and by each search engine...

For Google, it would appear that high volume users are the least concentrated with the broadest distribution as compared to searchers using Yahoo or MSN-Live.

Approximately 70 percent of all search queries done two months ago were performed by about 20 percent of Google users.

In the case of Yahoo, the concentration increased to about 73 percent. For MSN-Live 75 percent of the search queries were performed by the top 20 percent of users.

So logically, the question is: are these high volume searchers the same every month or is there some variations amongst these top searchers?

Google is showing the highest concentration of the top 20th percentile searchers returning to the top tier in a subsequent month.

For its part, Yahoo had about 58 percent of the top tier August searchers returning for the month of September. MSN-Live saw only about 52 percent of the top tier returning.

It will be interesting to see how this looks over the course of a longer period of time.

Will the same 52 to 60 percent of Internet users continue to perform the major share of searches on the top search engines, or is there some specific pattern or seasonal trend in the data?

Stay tuned to Search Engines Today for more findings on this.

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Source: Compete.com