(Coverage of the SMX East conference will continue at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Tancer, who works as Hitwise‘s general manager of global research, is in a good position to take on the subject.  He started his keynote by stating his love of data; apparently he recited pi to 200 places as a kid.  Tancer also quoted Walker Percy, who once said, "To become aware of each possibility of the search is to be onto something."

The Hitwise exec went on to talk about how people have searched more and more for gas-related sites as prices have risen.  Searches for porn have become more popular (perhaps because the economy has left folks wanting a diversion or lift) and banks have been receiving additional traffic.  "Data provides powerful insight to what’s going on with the economy," Tancer observed.

As for the pop culture side of things, Tancer spoke about searches for "hot photos" of Stacy Keibler and Sarah Palin.  The increasing volume of searches for Bigfoot costumes appears to be related to the recent hoax, too.

Finally, to return to tech and Google, looking at all this search data has allowed Tancer to identify groups of early adopters, and it turns out that the traditional groups haven’t yet embraced Chrome.  This is likely because Google didn’t do much to acknowledge Linux and Mac users.

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

One is by Bill Tancer, who many of us know as the General Manager, Global Research for Hitwise. More recently, Bill has released a book called “Click” which has been featured on ABCNews.com. Bill has always been an excellent source of insight into searcher behavior.

On the 7th, we will have Tim Armstrong, a corporate VP at Google, who also heads up Google’s North American advertising sales and operations teams. This looks like a great chance to get insight into the PPC side of the business.

Last, but not least (well I like to think so at least!), I will be there. I have a presentation on Internal Linking Tactics on Day 2 of the event. Want to get my take on how to manage your own link juice? Yeah – I think I have a few opinions on that.

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SES New York is here again, and WebProNews is there to bring you reports and videos from the Big Apple. Enjoy our coverage this week.

Bill Tancer, General Manager, Global Research, Hitwise said 66 percent of searches are done though Google, followed by Yahoo with 21 percent, MSN 7 percent, Ask 4 percent and other 2 percent.

Twenty-three percent of searches go from search engine to search engine followed by shopping and classified sites with 12 percent. Eleven percent of searches are for entertainment followed by business and finance with 9 percent and education with 8 percent.

Specifically Google Image Search accounts for 2.8 percent of searches, trailed by MySpace with 1.9 percent, Wikipedia with 1.95 percent, eBay 1.06 percent and YouTube1.02 percent.

Search engines can embrace some vertical search but it is difficult. If you can hand craft search results they can get better. Search has to get more specific.

A lot of information is being pushed to consumers from social networks. You can put a question in your status update on your social network and may receive a large amount of answers instead of having to go search. For example if you put in your status you are looking for a new phone, people may give you information recommending cell phones they like.
 

McDonald’s, in case you haven’t heard, intends to match Starbucks by offering similarly complicated and expensive drinks.  But no one’s sure how many people will want to sit and drink them while a bunch of kids scream in a nearby ball pit.

Bill Tancer, the general manager of global research at Hitwise, writes, "The prediction, Starbucks won’t lose customers to McDonald’s, but McDonald’s will be able to upsell their existing customers on the McCafe concept."

Tancer came to this conclusion after seeing (and showing) that visitors to the McDonald’s site tend to be younger than those loyal to Starbucks.  Yet the Starbucks crowd tends to own thicker wallets.  And both of these traffic trends seem to align with real-world stats.

It should be interesting, then, to see if Tancer’s prediction holds up.  Your humble author, who doesn’t drink coffee, will report from the sidelines.