Jeremy Liew recently wrote (and his must-read blog) that 54% of searches queries have three or more keywords. That got me thinking about a report I pulled together in late 2006 about similar statistics. So I placed them aside Jeremy's data (which comes from MarketingSherpa) and the results are very interesting. First, the data comes from different sources - so it's difficult to measure very specifically...
- 1-3 word queries accounted for 69.5% of searches in '06 and it fell to 68% - The real difference is in 5+ queries: now 19% of searches and 14% in '06 - Conversely, one word queries now account for 22% of searches
Here is my reasoning for the growth in one word queries and the fact that they represent close a quarter of all searches: - we are increasingly dependent on Google as a starting point and on the browser for navigation - this is proved by brand names consistently being the top searches: "eBay", "Yahoo", "Google" - I think about how I browse the internet now - it's entirely through the browsers search box... and others simply type "Yahoo" into to start their session...
2006 2008 1 word 13.5% 21.9% 2 word 28.8% 24.4% 3 word 27.2% 21.6% 4 word 16.4% 14.5% 5 word 8.0% 8.4% 6 word 3.7% 4.5% 7 word 1.6% 2.4% 8+ word 1.1% 3.7%
