Users Have Two Words For Search Engines

A study by real-time web analytics firm OneStat.com claims most users submit two-word queries to search engines.

Excuse me, Eric Schmidt? Pardon me, Terry Semel? One moment, Steve Ballmer? Hey there, Barry Diller>?

Did you know that most people using your search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, and Ask Jeeves) as well as others tend to submit two-word queries?

In that first paragraph above, I searched for each of your names and selected a link from the first page of results. Did you know that Google’s Eric Schmidt still has a Yahoo email address on his personal home page? I didn’t know that, but it only took me a two-word query to find it.

OneStat.com says those two-word queries rate just above three-word queries, 29.6 percent to 27.55 percent. The figures they show for July 2005 are an average of queries done over the last two months.

“Search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo can drive a lot of traffic to a web site. It is important that a webmaster or SEO expert knows what kind of search phrases they have to use to drive more traffic to a site,” said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat.com, in a statement.

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