Lies, Damned Lies, and Market Research

[dmorison]

According to Forrester Research, over 80% of Internet users rely on search engines to find information, products and services. Search engines are the ideal marketplace to bring companies and their customers together.

So what do the other 20% use? Their own crawlers?

Happy New Year everyone! :)

[HowlingWizard]

email and phone.

I have got a few email (to contact address on my site) asking "what is your web site".

Or people call and ask the same question. many of these people are getting the phone number from the web site.

many scary folk out there.

[encyclo]

To be fair, the research is talking about Internet users, not web users - a subtle distinction, I know, but important. My grandfather is an internet user, but has, AFAIK, never used a search engine, or ever fired up a web browser. He connects exclusively to send and receive email. He has never looked for "information, products and services", and never will! Also, some users rely on directories rather than search engines - if you're not in Yahoo or listed on their ISP's portal, you don't exist to them!

To me, the quoted statistic sounds very realistic.

[dwilson]

There's always just typing in Keyword.com

Just don't look for a well-known US government landmark that way!

[bakedjake]

There's always just typing in Keyword.com

Very true. I still do this when looking for the website of a company. I'll take best guess before I pop it into an SE.

Sometimes this leads to funny looks from co-workers, but oh well. :)

[hannamyluv]

My husband was using the internet for 3 months before he used or even knew what a SE was. One day, he was complaining that he couldn't find any sites on one of his favorite games. I thought that was odd, since it is a rather popular game. Pulled up google, typed in the words and thousands of sites came up. He was shocked.

He had been surfing around gaming sites that he found the URLs of in his gaming magazines. He could not believe that such a thing as a search engine existed (pretty amazing when you consider his wife makes a living doing advertising on SEs).

Anyway, point of story is, using a search engine is a learned behavior. Someone actually needs to tell you that you have to go to www.XXXX.com to be able to search the web. Otherwise, how would you know how or where to go if you were completly new to the internet? TV is slowly changing this with its internet refrences but change is slow to come.

[chadmg]

way way back when, i found most of what i wanted by just going from website to website through their links sections. well this was when search engines weren't very good and i usually still used them as a starting point. but there are always directories and going directly to known urls. bookmarks where REALLY important then. that's why having a popular portal was the original dream of many webmasters.