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%

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