A few days ago Robert Scoble indicated that the most searched term on Google was Yahoo. And even Yahoo searchers were looking for emm… Google. And now Niall Kennedy who is running a series on personalized home pages and their history, points out that….
The most downloaded Microsoft gadget is a Google search box.
Makes you wonder, if Google is now the default for search. Their increasing market share seems to reflect that. Not to mention the anecdotal evidence.
I know when my old ISP looks at its traffic it goes like this.
Someone wants to log on to http://www.gigaom.com. They go to the ISP home page where they find google. They put in http://www.gigaom.com. Google returns gigaom’s url. They click – they go to gigaom.com. 40% of traffic through my old ISP acts like that!
This is because many people set google.com as their homepage. People simply type “yahoo” or even “yahoo.com” the search box to get there.
I did some analysis with AOL search data. About 20% of all google searches are used for such purposes:
http://lifeisaventure.wordpress.com/2006/08/21/google-as-url-converter/
This seems to indicate nothing more than people’s reluctance to type www and .com into the location field of thier browser window. Google may be the most popular, but they certainly do not = Search. The Search Wars may have cooled, but they are not over and there is no clear winner.
Maybe I am missing something, but doesn’t this mean that yahoo = search just as much as google = search?
Winstonian (cool nickname) I think when people are searching on Google to find Yahoo, and those on yahoo (are using it) to search Google, kind of tells me that Google equals search for most. Like Yahoo means My.yahoo.
Anyway, as Billy The Kid says this just might be how things are for now… they might change, and I hope they change.
I don’t know anyone who uses anything other then Google when they want to search the web, I’m surprised their numbers aren’t even higher in these studies. I know from every large website I run, Google gives at least 80% of the search engine traffic.
I think the problem here is just laziness. Most people just get used to using a search engine as a command-line tool and thats it. I just put up a site called LuckyButton that lets you navigate to a bunch of different search engines from one search box, its basically trying to solve this problem or at least provide another option.
These are the old dogs who don’t bother finding out more effective way of working with the computers. Why would you otherwise use Google as your URL bar when you can hit Ctrl-L and start typing while it offers you a list of recently accessed URLs on Firefox?
Getting to Gmail for me is 4 keystrokes:
(1) Ctrl-L to get to the URL bar;
(2) Type ‘g’ and gmail.com comes up as the first item;
(3) Hit the tab key to select it;
(4) Hit enter – viola!
If people are lazy to type http://www. and .com, you can just hit ctrl+enter, and it will enter them for you, so its actually more work using google, but even so, I use google as my home page. Its mostly empty, so it looks clean, and if i ever need to find something, i just start typing and hit enter, and its right there.
Even though I have a google search built into IE7, its still nice because of the cleanness, and its still very usefull. I dont like having a lot of random stuff i dont use everywhere i look