CHAPTER ONE
Search: Reflecting Consciousness and Connecting Commerce
Search has become integrated into the fabric of our society. With more than 197.9 billion searches performed worldwide each month as of April 2014, approximately 6.6 billion web searches are performed every day. This means that on average about 7,500 searches are performed every single second of every day.1 In addition, users have grown to expect that the responses to their search queries will be returned in less than one second.
If you have ever come across the various “SEO is dead” claims that make the rounds periodically in the digital marketing world, rest assured: SEO is both alive and well—and has not, as many feared, been “killed” by social media marketing as a driver of web traffic. In fact, in November 2014, Twitter announced that by renewing its focus on SEO, it increased the number of logged-out visitors coming to the site tenfold—from 7.5 million to 75 million visitors per month.2.
The high demand for search continues because people can now obtain in mere seconds information that 20 years ago would have required a trip to the library, the use of a card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System, and a physical search through halls of printed volumes—a process that could easily have consumed two hours or more. Through the new channel of search, people can conduct many of their shopping, banking, and social transactions online—something that has changed the way our global population lives and interacts.