WebProNews

People in the U.S. still read and write email more than they search, but the gap between the two activities has narrowed as nearly 60 million adults use search every day.

The latest study from Pew Internet & American Life showed how search has become more widely used each day. On any given day, 41 percent of online users hit a search engine to find information.

Email tops the list of online activities, with about 52 percent of users writing or reading messages. People spend more time with email than they do search, which is to be expected considering the nature of each activity.

Pew listed data from comScore in ranking the search engines by their October 2005 unique visitors:

Google - 89.8 million
Yahoo! Search - 68 million
MSN Search - 49.7 million
Ask Jeeves - 43.7 million
AOL Search - 36.1 million

Also, Pew's figures demonstrated why the major search players have been amping up efforts to make their local search better than the competition. Much of the rise in search usage has been reflected in people looking for information based on queries that included ZIP codes, addresses, or phone numbers.

Sites belonging to Google, Yahoo, and MSN were the top three in local search. Time Warner, which includes AOL, and Ask Jeeves followed. When looking at Yellow Pages searches and the additional business-related filtering users can employ, Yahoo topped that list, followed by Verizon and Google.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.