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Drew Olanoff
Drew Olanoff was The Next Web's West Coast Editor. He coined the phrase "Social Good" and invented the "donation by action" model for onlin Drew Olanoff was The Next Web's West Coast Editor. He coined the phrase "Social Good" and invented the "donation by action" model for online charitable movements. He founded #BlameDrewsCancer. You can follow him on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, or email [email protected]
When it comes to searching for things on the web, everyone goes about it in a different way. For example, I still know people who search for “YouTube” on Google instead of typing ‘www.YouTube.com’ into their search bar. Crazy, right?
Data analytics firm Chitika did some interesting research into how many words users type to perform searches on the top five search engines.
The search engines include Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL. Chitika found that Ask.com users tend to type in the most words when searching, while AOL users type the least. The graph below is based on search engine traffic this month from North America.
It’s likely that the wordiness of Ask users are due to the fact that the site wants you to ask questions in natural language format, but this study is interesting none the less.
With most search engines providing auto-completion in their searchbox, it will be interesting to see if the total number of words people perform each search with drops, since the suggestions will override their natural predilection of being verbose.
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