![]() ![]() So, the resulting search competition on phones and laptops is alive-and fierce. We’re in an era when search knows that we often don’t know what we are searching for, but we do want to be informed and entertained. Windows just added “news and interests” to the Taskbar so you are led to results in Edge and Bing. On your phone, Apple and Google feature news and articles chosen “for you” by algorithm. Search is now in its “millennial years,” having grown up and integrating multiple sides of its personality even as it fragments. Search in that process became less like a door and more like an escalator in a department store-even like the elevator operator of old who’d announce the products available on each floor as he opened doors to let passengers off to discover “ladies’ lingerie” or “men’s suitings.” Then, search itself as a tool and as a behavior had to change as the web became the one place where we go to express our ideas, pursue future love, reinforce our friendships, build our professional networks, and look for and buy food, clothing-and even shelter. (Remember Richard Saul Wurman, the man who created TED, analyzing “Information Anxiety” in the dawning hours of the Information Age? Full disclosure: I worked with Richard in the late 80s and early 90s). Search started as an inquiry for information. Where once we’d simply “look stuff up,” when the web became our central marketplace we learned to carve off how we searched in ways that gave us more options than any single search engine could because our searches evolved to become less about facts and figures and more about getting into the specific areas that interested us most. Eventually, search became more a part of the journey and not just a means of conveyance, not simply a first stop on our way outward. Once upon a time, when Google entered the game, search was an elegant door to search for facts and information. ![]() Over time, as searchers became more “consumers” than “users,” the place searched occupied in our lives broadened. take place on Microsoft sites and 11% on Verizon Media sites. More than 25% of monthly digital searches on desktop in the U.S. Other players have also been claiming their share of the search market for years. From 2020 to 2021 alone, product searches on the platform grew more than 20x year over year. ![]() When Pinterest introduced Visual Search and Reverse Image search, it set itself up for a solid Google-free future where the platform would host 5 billion searches per month. Google years ago lost the lead in product searches to Amazon, where the majority of searches really do begin: 66% of online shoppers in the U.S. Perhaps most surprising though is that 69% of the total universe of the respondents from all 10 countries, just over 11,000 people, report a “very positive impact” on their “general well-being or overall quality of life” from their use of search-that’s a higher percentage than the responses on networking or communications or music or video streaming or online marketplaces, which speaks to the exceedingly important and even satisfying place that search serves in our lives. They also say they used an average of 2.84 search engines in the past 12 months. Of the 1,007 U.S.-based respondents, 62% reported using more than one search engine in the past 12 months and nearly 75% said they change their default search and browser settings.
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