April 26, 2001.

WhatWeb searchers want

The California based company MarketProfiles.net has recently finished a study of how visitors find the top 20 search engines and directories.

"Our study provides a low-cost way to understand visitors to the top-20 search engines and it provides valuable competitive insights to other general, regional, and topical search engine executives," says MarketProfiles.net owner, Gene Hall.

Not surprisingly searchers say that they are looking for an effective way to search the Internet, not a search engine geared towards sales. (As searchers we obviously do not have to be concerned about the search engine's need for revenue.)

When asked what features they would like that are not currently included in any search engine that they know of, they mention services like

• "language translations"
• "warnings that accessing certain sites might result in flooding"
• "a place where I can save a page of URLs to view later"

Sites like AltaVista and Google actually offer language translations. A "flood warning" system giving an analysis of long web pages, the amount of graphics, pop-ups, java, Flash and other time consuming accessories is an interesting concept, which should be given serious consideration by search sites. Including a personal Web based "bookmarking" system is definitely technically feasible.

According to the respondents, Yahoo is the search engine that they visit most frequently (22%) followed by Google (12%), AOL Search (9%), MSN Search (9%), and Ask Jeeves (9%).

As regards overall ratings (on a five-point scale) 97 percent favored Google, 91 percent Ask Jeeves, followed by Yahoo (86%), MSN Search 69%, and AOL Search (64%).

We suspect that the strong showing of MSN and AOL reflects the fact that so many users have these search pages as their default browser home page. When installing Explorer MSN becomes the default home page automatically, and AOL users will have a tendency to use AOL's own search services.

The popularity of Google is in harmony with Pandia's own poll, and confirms that searchers like Google's simple interface and impressive ability to find relevant sites, even if the searcher does not know how to compose more targeted queries. Ask Jeeves is a so-called "natural query" search engine. We are not impressed with Ask Jeeves' search results, but the respondents obviously like the ability to ask the search engine questions in everyday English.

There is a free industry summary at the MarketProfiles.net's site.

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