Aehso’s Output

Interesting analysis by Jeremy Crane of how web searches are distributed by user:

the top 1% of searchers performs a full 13% of all searches in a given month. If you extend this to the top 20% the number of queries increase to roughly 70%

I suspect I’m in that top 1%, CTRL-K is probably the Firefox keyboard shortcut I use most of all. This does imply that search engine usage stats would swing dramatically if these power-searchers were to switch engines…

It is odd isn’t it. Google have one of the best online feed readers on the market but it has absolutely no search capability. Zero, nada, no way to keyword search through the entire history of the feeds that I subscribe to. That is just plain wrong for a Google product. Every time I try find an old post I end up switching to the Google Blog Search but that does not restrict result to feeds I have subscribed to with Google Reader.

What a mess. But apparently Google realise that it is a mess. Poor Microsoft, trying to bully their way into search, are making a bigger and far more extensive mess.

Two “search the Irish corner of the web” sites worth noting:

• Scrúdú - an Irish search engine (supposedly launching in June - errr)
• Gimmiedat - an Irish web site directory

Both could be stressing the “local to the island of Ireland” aspect of their results which I think is a missed opportunity. Something like a real up front assurance that they don’t contain advertisements for irrelevant stateside commercial websites, that type of thing. Hopefully they will - anything that helps ween ordinary web users away from using the “pages from Ireland” option on google.ie can only be a good thing. I cannot count the number of times that my girlfriend/mum/sisters/brothers have asked me about international commercial websites they found by sticking something like “hotel” into that bloody search box and then clicking on one of the many “sponsored links” that infest the results page. Even the old Yahoo! Directory (Ireland) is safer!

Reality check: ordinary web users, the ones that barely know how to use Office and read their email, do not know the difference between an organic result link and a sponsored link. Until the misdirection (and quasi-fraud) by the search engine companies is cleaned up I for one am forwarding family and friends to local directories and revoking my Google-search-related-technical-support-services. Sentences beginning with “I found this on Google…” will fall on deaf ears.