The Internet and The U.S. in 2009
Stumbled across this great article talking about some facts and trends about search usage, online marketing and social media behavior in 2009 for individuals in the U.S. Some of the more interesting facts:
“The U.S. core search market grew 16 percent in 2009, driven by a 6-percent gain in unique searchers and a 10-percent gain in search queries per searcher. Google and Bing led among the core search engines in terms of increases in market share.”
The 10% gain in search queries per searcher is interesting: are people not finding what they want and need to refine their search or are they just using search engines more?
“Social networking continued to gain momentum in 2009 with nearly 4 out of 5 Internet users visiting a social networking site on a monthly basis and Facebook and Twitter propelling much of the growth in the category.”
This comes as no surprise, especially specifically highlighting Facebook and Twitter as the two major social networking traffic drivers.
I’m thinking we’ll only see these trends continue in 2010.
…”10-percent gain in search queries per searcher.”
For me, it’s not a matter of not finding what I need to find, it’s that Google has gotten so good at finding pages within websites that rather than going to Amazon and searching using their tool, I search “blue widget amazon” and get a result right to the product page. Same thing if I’m finding a movie on IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, whatever. Google Chrome makes it as easy as typing in the search query into the address bar. It’s glorious.
Not to mention the growth in video content (YouTube) and smartphones.
Maybe the 10% growth is slightly due to searchers getting smarter and doing more research on products and services.