mediajunk

At a search engine marketing conference held in Belfast a couple of days ago, a Google representative claimed that 65% of all searches were information-seeking (or, as he put it, "people trying to educate themselves"), while 20% were consumer queries. 20%! That seems unlikely. I suspect Google are conveniently using a very loose interpretation of the data. For example, if I type in "Jamaica", Google *could* suppose that I'm looking to purchase a sun holiday, when I may simply be looking for information on the country. Of course, the people at Google have more information at their disposal -- they can actually see which link I click on the results that are returned for my search on "Jamaica". In fact, via my Google toolbar data, they can probably tell how long I stay on any site I visit, and whether or not I make a purchase! In addition, searches are likely to be more specific, containing at least two words -- "package holidays in Jamaica" is more indicative of a consumer query than "history of Jamaica". Still, I don't believe that Google has done this, especially not when it comes out with such a high, round figure of 20%. The representative who quoted this, by the way, was promoting Google Adwords, so I think it's fair to assume he had a vested interest in giving a high figure. I'd say that less than 1% of my searches are consumer queries, and I suspect the same is true of the average *regular* user of the internet. The Google rep didn't explain, either, what the remaining 15% of queries are for. I guess that means they are porn searches!