What Does A Search Engine User Look Like?

By Aisling Brennan
Online Marketing Account Manager

Well, according to a new Hitwise study released earlier this month, US Online Search Report, it depends entirely on the search engine.

Google users are predominently male with 54 per cent of the search audience, whereas the majority of Yahoo! and MSN searchers are women, with 50 per cent and 54 per cent respectively. Yahoo!'s audience tends to skew younger, MSN's is older with the highest proportion of users older than 55. Meanwhile Google has the higher number of visitors with incomes over $100,000.

The report also found that users searching for news and media tend to frequent Google and Yahoo! while Google and Ask Jeeves are used mostly for those searching for educational sites.

Other highlights from the Hitwise study:

• 87 per cent of searchers on Google, Yahoo! and MSN enter one- or two-word queries. A smaller percentage, 69 per cent, of Ask Jeeves searchers enter one or two word queries. Hitwise summises that this is due to Ask's history of encouraging queries as questions strategy.

• Yahoo! Image Search more than doubled traffic figures, and Google Image Search almost doubled in traffic over the same period last year.

• Yahoo! Local had four times more visitors than Google Local. According to Hitwise this "local" audience tends to skew female.

• "Google" is the top search term on Yahoo! (1.88 percent) and MSN (4.07 percent), and third-highest on Ask Jeeves (0.59 percent).

• Google sends 10.68 percent of its traffic to the shopping and classifieds category, Yahoo! Search forwards 11.24 percent of traffic, MSN routes 10.65 percent, and Ask Jeeves 15.05 percent.

• According to Hitwise, Google continues to dominate all the major search engines with a 59.2 percent share of all searches in July 2005. That's a 14 percent increase over July 2004. Yahoo! came in second at 28.8 percent, and MSN were third with a 5.5 percent share. In total Google, Yahoo! and MSN represented a combined 93.5 percent of all U.S. Internet searches in July 2005.

• Both Yahoo! and MSN derived the majority of their visits from associated portals. 73 percent of Yahoo! Search visitors originated at Yahoo.com and My.Yahoo.com, while 61 percent of MSN Search visitors came from MSN.com, My.MSN.com, and Dellnet.MSN.com. Hitwise commented that Google's growth is notable particularly since it doesn't have portals pushing traffic to it like Yahoo! and MSN.