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 behavior 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 percent of the Internet population to 41 percent. This means that the number of people 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 percent.
ComScore data 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 percent.
This means that the use of search engines is edging up on email as a primary Internet activity. The Pew Internet Project data show that on a typical day, email use is still the top Internet activity, with about 52 percent of American Internet users sending and receiving email.
The findings have considerable consequences for the way people gather and use information online and the way e-commerce is conducted.
“Most people think of the Internet as a vast library, and they increasingly depend on search engines to help them find everything from information about the people who interest them to transactions they want to conduct, organizations they need to deal with, and interesting factoids that help them settle bar bets and backyard arguments,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project.
“The evolution of search engines as everyday consumer Web tools has made them a vital resource for marketers,” said James Lamberti, vice president of comScore Networks. “Search engines are obviously a critical vehicle in reaching consumers during the buy cycle, but they also offer a rich source for consumer profiling, segmentation, and measurement of product demand. To date, we have only witnessed the preliminary impact of search engines on e-commerce.”
The latest data from comScore show that Google was the most heavily used search engine in October 2005 with 89.8 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo Search (68 million unique visitors), MSN Search (49.7 million unique visitors), Ask Jeeves (43.7 million unique visitors), and AOL Search (36.1 million unique visitors).
The Pew Internet Project findings come from a nationally representative telephone survey conducted between Sept. 13 and Oct. 14. that interviewed 2,251 American adults age 18 and older (including 1,577 Internet users). The margin of error on the Internet user portion of the survey is plus or minus 3 percent.
The comScore data come from comScore Media Metrix, an Internet audience measurement service that uses a massive cross section of more than 1.5 million U.S. consumers who have given comScore explicit permission to capture their browsing and transaction behavior confidentially, including online and offline purchasing.
