Goog Tops Search List Of Course, But Numbers of Searches Surprise

[Brett_Tabke]

PCMag [izurl.com] quoting (sigh) Comscore again:

"The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide," said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president, who authored the report.. "Search is clearly becoming a more ubiquitous behavior among Internet users that drives navigation not only directly from search engines but also within sites and across networks. If you equate the advancement of search with the ability of humans to cultivate information, then the world is rapidly becoming a more knowledgeable ecosystem...

[tedster]

A 46% growth in searches over all engines, and a 58% increase for the Google network! That really is some growth for just one year. The article says, "I'd pin it on the death of the bookmark", and certainly the death of the bookmark is a related sign.

I'd say cause and effect flows the other direction. As search technology has become much more dependable, there's less reason to use bookmarks. I know that I rarely bookmark a site now, unless it was hard to find in the first place.

[TheMadScientist]

A 46% growth in searches over all engines, and a 58% increase for the Google network!

That's an interesting number when you think about revenue per search. Their revenue wasn't up anywhere near 58% like their searches were, which means overall revenue per search declined... Interesting.

[Rumbas]

Wow, that's an amazing growth rate. Back in the old days we estimated 500 mio searches in total world wide on Google. I thought that was a lot, but todays numbers out performs everything I would imagine back then. And they social networking will over take search? Hmm, will take a while imo.

[cwnet]

According to the article, The US, China, Japan and the UK accounted for 51.4 BILLION searches.

Again, according to the article, "About 87.8 MILLION searches originated on the Google Sites network". (global network?)

If true, Google has a search share of 6.27 %.

?

Me thinks this article is so badly written and researched it is not only useless but dangerous as people who clearly turned of their brain when reading jump to conclusions that are not justified by the (non-) content of this remarkable piece of 'state of the art journalism'.

<edited for typo>

[tedster]

Good catch, cwnet. Those two numbers are a definite disconnect! Seems clear to me that Google's total network searches are in the billions, not millions.

[wolfadeus]

But isn't this the same effect publishers can see with growing traffic? A decrease in CTR, as well as growth even in search terms that don't change their ranking on SERPs?

[goodroi]

one of the worst articles i've ever seen on a popular website in recent memory. it does not clearly define what is or is not part of the neworks. it also seems to use millions & billions as the same thing. I know the economy is bad but there is a reason why you should pay for a good editor.

[physics]

Personally, I'd pin it on the death of bookmarks. In the time that I can scroll down or enter a search term into a bookmark field, I can find it in a search engine.

Were that many people really using bookmarks?

An alternative explanation is that as more and more people come online, the average web user is less and less web savvy and thus more likely to type 'yahoo' into google.com search box in order to get to Yahoo. Even that probably can't explain such a big increase.
Another factor might be that Google et. al. have become so good at indexing sites (while on site searches generally still leave much to be desired) that people have finally decided it's easier/faster/less frustrating to just try searching Google for what they want then going to example.com and searching for what they want.

[aristotle]

India and China have very big populations, and could account for a lot of the growth.

[JS_Harris]

I stopped bookmarking sites when other sites began snooping around in my bookmarks or receiving reports of what I've bookmarked through features like toolbars... not that I use any of them anymore either.

I think the biggest, and most important, factor in why Search is expanding is because you don't HAVE to go to Google or Bing or Yahoo to perform a search, many sites offer a handy G Y or B search feature on site.

Allowing people to monetize on site search via adsense ensures the trend will continue.

[Quadrille]

Probably a little to do with Chrome, where everything seems to be a search.

I find the (relative) drop in revenue per search interesting too - is it lower spend per ad, or lower click per user? Or both?