Jane_Doe - 7:14 pm on Jul 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

One of my sites generates a lot of email. I've noticed I get different types of emails from visitors from Google compared to visitors from AOL. One of my sites was dropped from Google due to a software glitch for a couple of months. During that time, the more sophisticated, very well written emails dropped off, which leads me to suspect that Google users have probably have higher incomes/higher education than some of the other search engines.

With the emails I get from people ending in aol.com, I get a lot of questions asking for advice. I even put in my contact page that due to the large volume of email I receive, I can't provide people with individual advice or replies. After that my email did drop off, but I still get a lot of emails asking for advice and 90% of them end in aol.com. People ask me questions you wouldn't believe-- "Should I take this medication my doctor prescribed?", "What should I do for condition X?" (when I don't even have a web site on condition X), How can I lose weight? (also not a subject of any of my sites). Quite a few have also sent me me their medical test results and ask me to interpret them (I'm not a doctor or any kind of medical person). Its very strange.

So I don't know much about marketing, and I know that my email is just anecdotal examples, but my guess would be that aol users and Google users tend to have very different demographics.