But I figure all those hours spent looking at search engine usage factoids should at least result in a blog post.

Need data on online user behavior, search engine market share stats, e-commerce or Internet industry research? Start here:

• Pew Internet & American Life Project: press releases, reports
• Jupiter Research, including Search Marketing and Online Behavior and Demographics
• comScore press releases
• Nielsen NetRatings and Nielsen BuzzMetrics
• HitWise press releases and Data Center, including political stats and top search terms
• Compete’s blog
• iProspect research and press releases
• Forrester Research – free reports (registration required)
• iCrossing – registration required
• IDC press releases
• Yankee Group
• IT Facts data on tech and Internet and search-engine specific data
• ZDNet research roundup - collection of data from other sources
• ClickZ Web stats and trends articles
• eMarketer articles and research excerpts
• Online Publishers Association (OPA) research library and industry news
• NetCraft – mostly Internet security related facts
• Harris Interactive/Harris polls – not tech-specific, but has an occasional tidbit
• PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) press releases – requires some digging

I’ve created a search on Rollyo for web stats, so if you’re looking for a specific piece of data, try limiting your search just to these sources.

According to Pew, millenials are actually the leading users of libraries for help solving problems, as well as more general patronage.

Another insight from the December 2007 study is that more people turn to the Internet than consult experts or family members to provide information and resources for answers to common problems (with the exception of some specific topics such as health, thank Heavens).

Facebook traffic jumped 81% year over year to 34.7 million visitors, now that registration is open to non-students (including quite a few pets, if Stewie’s ever growing circle of Facebook friends is any indication).

The release goes on to say that “the top-gaining site categories in 2007 reflected trends in both the online and offline worlds. The politics category grabbed the top position, gaining 35%, as the 2008 presidential election and primary season kicked into high gear.” Not to be outdone by current events of any gravity, sites devoted to celebrity entertainment news, “from Britney Spears’ meltdowns to Anna Nicole Smiths death,” kept up with an equally impressive 32% increase in visitors.

In total — including all searches for Britney, Anna Nicole and even “poop porn” — more than 113 billion core searches were conducted in the U.S. last year, with Google representing a 56% share of the market.

Yahoo Search is in second place with a little over 1.5 billion searches and 21.5% of the total. MSN trails a distant third with only 8.4% of all U.S. searches conducted on the Windows Live search engine. Rounding out the top 5 search engines are AOL Search and Ask.com, with 5.3% and 2.5% of search market share, respectively.

At the bottom of the list is the search aggregator Dogpile, which saw fewer net searches than the previous year, with year over year growth a -10.6%.

HitWise, a competing market research firm, also released its May search data today. According to HitWise, in May Google captured a whopping 65.1% of all U.S. searches, up from 59.3% last year. The number of searches attributed by HitWise to Yahoo are in line with Nielsen’s data: 20.9%, a figure that’s down slightly from May 2006. And MSN/Live Search garnered 8.4% of searches, down from 12.1% of marketshare 12 months prior.

Ask.com fared a little better based on HitWise data, with 3.9% of the market compared to 2.5% that Nielsen reported. Either way, IAC’s Ask.com continues to lose market share to the bigger players.

The author of the wonderful blog Creating Passionate Users is facing death threats. She’s just one of innumerable numbers of women who have stopped blogging or participating in online communities because of intimidation and sexual threats. The moral dilemma for me is that she says the more attention she’s getting, the worse it gets. I’m struggling over whether we other bloggers should drop the subject entirely and get her name out of the spotlight. But this is an important issue to me and I think it needs to be discussed — and nothing I say or don’t say will change this situation. What makes some people so vile? And what is it about the anonymity of the Web that turns already-vile people into full-blown sociopaths? And, specifically, whence this hostility toward women? And why?!

Some people critize female bloggers who decide to exit the space after being threatened and harassed as being thin-skinned; they say it’s “just talk”. I think those people probably have pretty poor instincts.

It reminds me of an interesting aphorims I read once: In The Gift of Fear (a book I haven’t read but have seen referenced many times), Gavin De Becker says that at core, men are afraid that women will laugh at them; and at core, women are afraid men will kill them.

I don’t know anyone who’s laughing.

Updated May 7, 2007:
Slate has an article that mirrors some of my thoughts on the issue (i.e., why “just ignore it” isn’t an actual solution to the problem).

According to recent HitWise data, visits to pornographic sites are dropping while visits to online communities are rising. The latter category includes sites like MySpace and Facebook… But come to think of it, the former probably does too!

The market research firm says that 13% of all website visits in the U.S. last year were to pornography sites, compared to only 7% to search engines. However — and this is very interesting — HitWise’s clickstream data shows that, in Britain, porn traffic was already passed by search engine traffic last year.

Check out this article, even if only because it contains my favorite sentence of any Economist article ever: “[Second Life] Users must first buy genitalia for their avatars, who otherwise resemble Barbie and Ken dolls when unclothed.”

Tagged: hitwise data, porn industry, Internet users

Apparently search engine users are suffering from a malady called search fatigue.

Search fatigue, according to the author Jeffrey Beall, is “a feeling of dissatisfaction when search results do not return the desired information”. Yikes!

I expect it to be listed in the next version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (although the DSM-IV isn’t going to see a revision until 2011, according to Wikipedia).

But what about search marketing fatigue, a feeling of dissatisfaction when search engine optimization efforts do not return top-3 results for targeted keywords? As soon as that’s covered under worker’s comp, I’m putting in for permanent disability.

Tagged: are you kidding?, SEO, search fatigue

“The historically passive consumer is changing rapidly, not only becoming more informed and confident about purchase decisions, but also increasingly taking control of the consumption of information and content that used to be distributed by networks, studios, publishers and retailers,” said Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, in a press release.

The report says that consumers are taking control of their consumption of online content and brands.