Search Engines Usability Study

Do people using search engines able to achieve what they wanted to? At least the growing numbers indicate so.

60% of people achieved their objectives using search engines in 1999
In 2008, this figure had increased to 75%

In 2004, 40% of people visited the homepage and then drilled down to the actual objective page.
In 2008, only 25% of the people do so.

Top Twenty Googled Health Conditions

Here is a list of the most commonly searched Health Terms on Search Engines:

1. Pregnancy
2. Cancer
3. Flu
4. Depression
5. Diabetes
6. Addiction
7. Herpes
8. HIV
9. Anxiety
10. Stroke
11. HPV
12. Bipolar
13. Cholestrol
14. Headache
15. Menopause
16. Hepatitis
17. Arthritis
18. ADHD
19. Asthma
20. Fibromyalgia

Growth Rate of Paid Clicks on Google

According to a Comscore report, Google had 515mm Paid clicks in the US in February. This is how the paid clicks growth rate on Google have been over the past few months:

October : +37%
November : +27%
December : +12%
January : 0%
February : +3%

Google’s Performance on Social Networks

Google deals with two major social networks : MySpace and Orkut. With MySpace, Google has also signed a deal to deliver at least $900 million per annum in revenues. However, Google has said that social networks are not monetizing as much as previously estimated.

Due to this, the traffic acquisition costs has risen from 29.1% to 30.3% of revenues in the last quarter.

Are Search Engines Trust-Worthy?

Do you think Google is trustworthy? More and more people have begun to distrust information provided by Search Engines. Only 51 percent of people in 2007 trust the information compared to 62 percent in 2006.

How much data do Google servers process everyday?

Google processes 20 petabytes of data per day. That is, 20,000,000,000,000,000 bytes every day.

This works out to around 231,000,000,000 bytes per second!!!

Yahoo vs. Google in Japan

Unique Japanese visitors to Yahoo properties : 41 million (August)
Unique Japanese visitors to Google properties : 31 million (August)

Search Engine market share in Japan for Yahoo : 65.9%
Search Engine market share in Japan fo Google : 27.8%

Google’s new deal with Japanese mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo will provide Google search to 48 million NTT DoCoMo customers.

Gmail Vs. Yahoo Mail Vs. Hotmail Vs. AOL

Popularity of each of these mail accounts:

Hotmail : 47 million unique visitors (April)
AOL : 42.3 million unique visitors (April)
Gmail : 90 million (approx. projected for November 2007)
Yahoo mail : 250 million (approx. projected for November 2007)

Growth rate of Gmail is 53.6% compared to Yahoo (3.21%) and Google is projected to overtake Yahoo by 2010.

Google traffic growth in 2007

The traffic is still as much growing as it had been all along. Overall growth has been 22.42 percent.

Gainers
iGoogle : 267.64%
Book search : 54.66%
Gmail : 53.6%
Maps : 51.57%

Losers
Product Search : -73.26%
Scholar : -32.14%
Video Search : -11.82%

Is Advertising Gambling sites legal?

No. According to the Federal Wire Wager Act, unregulated commercial gambling is prohibited throughout United States. This has cost the Big 3 of internet to lose cumulatively $31.5 million for having accepted money to advertise gambling website between 1997 and June 2007. The individual fine imposed is as under

Microsoft : $21 million
Yahoo : $7.5 million
Google : $3 million