How We Search

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Comscore, the sort-of Nielsen Ratings system of search engines, has put out its latest search engine rankings. No surprises, here! Google is still King of the mountain garnering a 65% share of all U.S. searches. Yahoo! comes in at a distant second at 19.6% and Microsoft sites at 8.4%.

As an aside, when you add up Yahoo!'s 19.6% and Microsoft's 8.4%; that Yahoo!-Microsoft deal doesn't look so very formidable does it?

However, there's more than math involved here, as well.

Google search engine users conduct twice as many searches a month as Yahoo! or Microsoft.

Here's the raw data, as Anderson Cooper would say:

- Google users conduct, on average, 54.5 searches a month.

- Microsoft users weigh in, on average, at 14.3 searches a month.

Add to this that traditionally, user studies have always shown the following:

1. When a user doesn't find what they are looking for in a search, more than half try again changing their search terms.

3. An even smaller minority give up after one fruitless search.

So why do Google users conduct more searches?

I wonder if this says anything about the quality of Google's results in the first place.

I wonder if the demographics of Google users are less versed in how to construct a search query than their competitors.

I wonder if that same demographic is more inclined to use Google as their bookmarking tool. I, for one, do. It's much easier to type in the first few letters of a web site and then click on the whole search query that automatically completes and gets me to the link in a couple of clicks. As tedious as that sounds, it is much easier than scrolling through my disorganized bookmarks.

Am I alone on this one?

Renee Oricchio

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987.