Everything seems to have a small pool of people who do the bulk of the using. Whether it’s eating fast food or working out, there’s a loyal core. Who wasn’t grossed out in Supersize Me when they revealed that there are “heavy users” at McDonald’s that eat all three meals there several times a week? There are people who eat at Jack In A Box more times in a week than I have in 25 years. The advent of something that enables a certain lifestyle has changed how heavy users function in the world; it’s created a reliance.

Search is no different. The answer to anything is available at any time, any place. It’s changed the way some people operate their lives, how they use their brains, what they feel the need to remember and what can be transient. I have an engineer friend who always seems to have new gadgets, and he (of course) has a phone with PDA/browser/music/camera. He’s always online, Googling stuff mid-conversation as he thinks of questions about the topic at hand. I haven’t gotten a similar phone as a discipline to step away from the screen, not because it’s not something I’d use constantly.

I’ve talked about search with my friends (job hazard), and found that we don’t conform to the usual search behavior reported in studies and assumed when doing SEO work. Admittedly, we’re younger, more tech-savvy, more educated than the average American computer user. Nobody uses defaults, everyone exclusively uses Google for search. We don’t go down into the results if it’s not in the first page (30 results for me), but rather we refine the query. We don’t use information, we text Google for free to get the numbers and addresses.

When I write, I search words through the Answers.com add-on to the Google toolbar to get the thesaurus and make sure I’m picking the one with the right nuances. In conversation, when someone starts off with, “I wonder…”, half the time someone’s reaching for their notebook to find out the answer immediately. It’s a radically different way of life and operating. Battelle talks about this study from Complete in regard to who the big three have in mind when designing their tools–the 20% of people who do 70-75% of the searches, or the people who do a few searches a week? That’s the practical, business application, and an interesting question. I’m more interested in the trending toward the search volume of power searchers becoming the norm as the generations raised with technology come of age. What does it mean for information? What does it mean for search and the industry that has grown up around it?

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 3:49 pm and is filed under search engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.