A posting from Nielsen Online which surfaced today suggests that the wall between Google and other search services is not necessarily as high as we may have thought. Apparently, search is just as imbalanced as the American tax system with, 20% of users making 80% of the searches out there, and these people are not necessarily married to Google. Moe to the point, “a third of all searchers make use of three or more search engines per month, and 30 percent of Google searchers specifically make use of Microsoft’s search engine.”
The data sheds a light on something that the majority of the techies caught in this bubble of bleeding edge behaviors forget: the average user still does not even search in the way we do. When I want to search for something, I type my query into the address bar of either Chrome or Firefox. The majority of people out there seem to not even use the search bar in most browser. Instead (this is something I’ve witnessed time and again firsthand), people are ingrained in going to Google.com and searching from there. Thus we see a whole slew of users who are ready to go to whichever site to run their searches. If Bing really turns out to be all that and a bag of chips, it could well steal some of Google’s pie.
- Original story via ArsTechnica
