So, you’ve typed your search term into your browser, or perhaps the Google homepage itself, and for once, you can’t find what you need. So what do you do? Most people’s gut reaction is to avoid trawling the lower echelons of Google – and search elsewhere. A new report from Chitika seems to tell us that people go to Yahoo and Ask in very large numbers, once the King of Search has failed.
Data from 39,233 users was analysed – users who searched for the same term on different engines. The results are quite eye opening – 49.5% of people switched to Yahoo, 30.29% went across to Ask, and 16.4% went to Bing. Just 3.8% resorted to using AOL.
Bing is often considered much more popular than Ask, so the data showing a heavy reliance on Ask is very surprising, and shows that the Ask brand is far stronger than previously thought. Chitika expected there to be a heavy usage of Bing – at around 35%.
Daniel Ruby, Chitika’s Research Director for Online Insights said of the new data: “It kind of goes to show that, when you’re really struggling to find something, you’ll skip past what’s popular and search with something that’s different and unique.”
SEO
In terms of SEO, it demonstrates that Yahoo! and Ask are still very much worth optimising for – and this news is of particular interest to those of us who take more notice of how to get good results in Bing and forget to think about Ask. It could mean that Ask’s branding has lodged itself in the heads of users much more effectively than Bing’s, despite Microsoft’s fervent attempts at pushing its brand.
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