How do I get to www.google.com?
Written by Jeremy Crane (contact - e-mail) -- October 17th, 2007 | Recommend ThisA few weeks ago I pulled together a quick post that I didn’t think was going to make much of a splash. As it turned out my quick and dirty analysis on “search fulfillment” got a lot of people thinking and asking questions. All those great questions sparked some additional thoughts. The main question that came to mind is specifically how the top search engines differ with respect to how they are predominantly used. For instance, perhaps navigational search can explain some of the difference in search fulfillment.
By navigational search I am referring to searches where someone is trying to get to a specific site by searching for the actual web address or a portion of it. For instance someone might search for Amazon, amazon.com, or even www.amazon.com to get to Amazon’s website. It’s actually astonishing how often people search for the complete web address and click on the corresponding search result to get to the site they are trying to navigate to. It makes me laugh every time I see my parents do this, but even more amazing is when the “web savvy” amongst us does this.
Almost nine times out of ten when I’m looking at referring search terms the first term on the list is some variation of the domain name. In some sense these navigational searches could represent “non-monetizable” searches for the engines. People searching these navigational terms and ending up at the matching domain are by definition trying to get somewhere very specific. It’s going to be hard to get these searchers to go somewhere other than their intended destination, no matter how high your PPC budget happens to be.
Navigational searches as a percentage of total searches are amazingly consistent month-over-month. On average navigational search is about 17% of all search traffic on the top three engines and this varies little over the course of the year. There is however, significant variation from engine to engine. While Yahoo! and MSN/Live searches are typically between 27% and 28% navigational, Google searches are only about 14% navigational.
I’d be curious if anyone has any thoughts about why Google has significantly fewer navigational searches (percentagewise) than the other two top engines. Perhaps my mom is a Yahoo! or Live Search user … I’ll have to ask sometime.
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October 17th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
I’d have to speculate there are more browsers defaulting to Yahoo and LiveSearch instead of Google when a link is mistyped. With that said, as you point out, those searches are not very valuable, so Google could care less about losing that share.
Cheers,
BW
October 18th, 2007 at 1:01 am
I can speculate a little as well, as this entry is stimulating. I suppose that it’s known that many people are aware they’re typing addresses into a search field, but how often? If it’s an appreciable share, then having an ‘i’m feeling lucky’ button next to your search box might have some effect. Are these stats compiled in a way that would reflect that, or no?
October 18th, 2007 at 5:15 am
Actually, these searches are valuable. For the larger sites Google doesn’t allow PPC adverts but for thousands of smaller sites there is a PPC advert at the top of the page.
Google is making money when the user clicks on the PPC ad.
Example:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=www.theaa.com&gl=uk
October 18th, 2007 at 8:16 am
I would question how many of these are actually conscious searches in the sense that users go to their engine of choice, wait for the page to load, then actually type http://www.amazon.com and hit the search button?
I’m apparently doing this all the time, however I’m not, it’s just that I’m impatient for a new browser to open very often. I go to start, pick my browser of choice and then immediately click into the address bar, quickly typing in the site I want and hit return, all without really checking the screen.
What actually happens is that the browser fully loads (on the search engine I’ve saved as my homepage), disregards/not registers that I clicked into the address bar and then enters the http://www.amazon.com address into the search field, as that’s where the cursor is defaulted to appear on the page. Since I hit return anyway, the search is made, and of course I sheepishly pick the top result that is now on the page in front of me!
I do see myself as web savvy, just impatient with that!
October 18th, 2007 at 8:34 am
I’ve just blogged about why I do it:
First, if I type into the search box instead of the address bar, it doesn’t matter if I make a typing mistake. Second, I might be guessing or have half-remembered the URL I want: it may look stange if I get it right, but often I don’t. Third, there are plenty of Web sites that are not very responsive, or include a lot of junk code. Rather than going to the site, I might actually want to look at it in Google’s cache first.
Jeremy, maybe your parents are smart ;-)
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/10/18/how_do_you_get_to_googlecom.html
October 18th, 2007 at 9:44 am
@Jack … I never said my parents weren’t smart! Man I’ll never hear the end of it at Thanksgiving … :)
October 18th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Yahoo and MSN users are captive to their legacy email accounts and use the search box that’s closest to them. Yahoo and Hotmail each have 5X the users of Gmail, a fact most Google fanboys seldom acknowledge.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/08/a-comparison-of-live-hotmail-gmail-and-yahoo-mail
People go to Google to explicitly search for something. One extra step. May as well just type in amazon.com. Google would love to be up there with MSN and Yahoo. If they had managed to buy Facebook they may have had a chance.
October 18th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
OK, my guess: Yahoo, MSN and Live.com are quite heavily used as a browser ‘Home page’. Maybe it is just because they are the default setting for IE or they are just popular news sites. So I would speculate that a significant share of Live.com’s search traffic is coming from those ‘Home page’ users. Maybe much more than Google’s search traffic. And here comes Matt and his impatience. And I would go even further and speculate that Live.com’s users tend to be a bit less proficient handling a browser so they may mix up the location bar and the search field more often.
October 20th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Actually, I use it for a page i already know the url to because of the right click “Search Google for …” in firefox.
October 24th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Your remark on PPC may not be entirely true. For my father e.g. soccer news is important. He searches for Ajax.nl on Google (a Dutch soccer team), and then finds Google news on Ajax. Then he clicks through to news.google.com. I had to teach him recently a new trick, since Google didn’t show news on the search page anymore! So now he clicks on news first, and then types “Ajax”.
Also it’s very smart of Google to not show him Javascript development pages nor cleaning detergent pages.
December 3rd, 2007 at 5:54 pm
hmmm…. interesting. i think because the earlier browser plugin was done by yahoo and MSN as part of their popular messanging service and IE. google is a bit late comer.
azlan
Online Business with a kampung boy
December 13th, 2007 at 5:38 am
AAbigail
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December 28th, 2007 at 10:54 am
I was looking at the leaked AOL search data the other day and noticed that “Goggle” (sic) is one of the top search terms… “Google” (spelled correctly) is #1.
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