Search engines have become an increasingly important part of the online experience of American Internet users. The most recent findings from Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and consumer behaviour trends from the comScore Media Metrix consumer panel show that about 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day.
These results from September 2005 represent a sharp increase from mid-2004. Pew Internet Project data from June 2004 show that use of search engines on a typical day has risen from 30 per cent to 41 per cent of the Internet-using population, which itself has grown in the past year. This means that the number of those using search engines on an average day jumped from roughly 38 million in June 2004 to about 59 million in September 2005 � an increase of about 55 per cent. comScore data, which are derived from a different methodology, show that from September 2004 to September 2005 the average daily use of search engines jumped from 49.3 million users to 60.7 million users � an increase of 23 per cent.
This means that the use of search engines is edging up on email as a primary Internet activity on any given day. The Pew Internet Project data shows that on a typical day, email use is still the top Internet activity. On any given day, about 52 per cent of American Internet users send and receive email, up from 45 per cent in June of 2004.
comScore data shows that compared to the amount of time people use search engines, the time users’ spend sending and receiving email on web-based clients such as Hotmail and Yahoo Mail is still considerably higher. On an average day, Internet users on the comScore panel spent more than 24 minutes on email, compared to 3.5 minutes for search engines.
This is not surprising, the study said, given the average time of a search compared with the average time of reading and writing email. At the same time, it does show that email continues to be a powerful application that commands a notable amount of users’ time online on any given day.
Overall, among Internet users, there is hardly a difference between the size of the email-using population and the size of the search-engine using population. Pew Internet Project data shows that 91 per cent of all Internet users had ever sent or receive email 90 per cent of Internet users had used search engines.
The latest data from comScore shows that Google was the most heavily used search engine in October 2005 with 89.8 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo Search (68 million), MSN Search (49.7 million), Ask Jeeves (43.7 million), and AOL Search (36.1 million).
One of the trends comScore data has captured in recent months is the rise of local searches � that is, searches related to geographically distinct places. These searches involve "local qualifiers" � or search terms including specific items such as ZIP codes, telephone numbers and street addresses. Consumers are using local search tools to coincide with other online activity, such as job searches, retail shopping and travel planning.
The use of email is the top Internet activity tracked in Pew Internet Project work. Search engine use is the second. And newsgathering the third. The remaining activities are a scattering of other activities that are regularly queried in project surveys and are included as examples of where search engine use stacks up in comparison with other well-known Internet activities.
The Pew Internet Project findings cited in the report come from a nationally representative telephone survey of 2,251 American adults (age 18 and older), including 1,577 Internet users, between September 13-October 14, 2005. The margin of error on the Internet user portion of the survey is plus or minus 3 per cent.
The comScore data cited in this report comes from comScore Media Metrix, an Internet audience measurement service that uses a massive cross-section of more than 1.5 million US consumers who have given comScore explicit permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.
