17 Million out of 20 Million Searches Are for "Free"
Posted by Melanie Phung on Thursday, August 17, 2006 at 11:28 am
The Wall Street Journal quantified the leaked AOL data to reveal that over 17 million separate searches (out of 20 million) involved the search for something “free.” Free was followed by “new,” “lyrics,” “county,” “school,” “city,” “home,” “state,” “pictures,” “music,” “sale,” “high,” “map,” “center,” and a three letter word that starts in “s” and ends with “x.”
On the other hand, the Washington Post says that out of more then 36 million search queries, the term most often queried… drum roll… “Google.”
Huh? Are we talking single-query searches or each keyword separately even if part of a phrase? Need to think a bit harder about how exactly that works out because the “truthiness” of it is suspect (unless a lot of people were searching for “free Google” and/or the two papers are looking at different sets of users).
As for the phenomenon of people using one search engine to search for another… well, that’s been covered before.
Was this reported in the SJ Merc? Can you send me a link?
I highly doubt global warming, melting icecap and climate change are even close to the top 3 searches in any popular search engine. But if someone is reporting that, I’d want to cite it.
(Sidenote: AOL uses Google to power its search results, but data for the two are always reported separately.)
Just type in “top 500 searched words” on Google, “Global warming” is listed among them.
I think you’re making my point for me: There’s a world of difference between being in the “top 3″ terms and being among the “top 500.”
I’m not disagreeing that the data I blogged about are probably wrong, but I can’t believe any major media outlet has come out saying that “melting icecaps” gets more queries than, oh say “sex” or even “Google, in the top 2 search engines. Again, please cite your sources.
Other findings by Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal: 47% of searches resulted in no click by the user. 28% of searches were refinements of previous searches. And 42% of the time, the user clicks on the first item in the search results.
It doesn’t look right to me. According to a local media survey, the most searches on Google and Yahoo are “global warming”, “melting icecap”, “climate change” and “pornography”.