How People Search
Search engines invest significant resources into understanding how people use search, enabling them to produce better (i.e., faster, fresher, and more relevant) search engine results. For website publishers, the information regarding how people use search can be used to help improve the usability of the site as well as search engine compatibility.
Data from comScore provides some great insight into what people actually search for when they perform a search. Table 1-5 shows a breakdown of many of the major categories that people’s Internet searches fall into, based on comScore data for October 2008.
Table 1-5. Searches by market segment
Parent category name | Percent of total searches |
|---|---|
Directories/Resources | 16.60% |
Retail | 11.86% |
Entertainment | 11.54% |
Services | 6.63% |
Education | 4.59% |
Conversational Media | 4.04% |
Government | 3.87% |
Health | 3.38% |
Games | 3.26% |
News/Information | 3.06% |
Hobbies/Lifestyle | 3.05% |
Business/Finance | 2.94% |
Travel | 2.21% |
Community | 1.94% |
Regional/Local | 1.87% |
Sports | 1.78% |
Technology | 1.73% |
Automotive | 1.67% |
Real Estate | 1.43% |
Career Services and Development | 1.12% |
Telecommunications | 0.78% |
Auctions | 0.57% |
Portals | 0.56% |
ISP | 0.38% |
Gambling | 0.27% |
Business to Business | 0.25% |
This shows that people search across a very wide number of categories. Search engines are used to find information in nearly every portion of our lives. In addition, user interactions with search engines can be a multistep process. Witness the user search session documented by Microsoft and shown in Figure 1-5.
Figure 1-5. Merrell shoes user search session ...