In what isn’t much of a surprise at all, the Pew Internet Project released a study today confirming that search engine use increasingly becoming an everyday activity for web users, and has email in its sights.

49% of all web users utilize search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Live Search every day. While that number doesn’t sound particularly stunning, it represents a sustained and steady rise from the 33% number reported in 2002. In comparison with email, whose usage has risen 15% in the last six years, search engine usage has risen 69%.

Lagging at the bottom of the list was “visiting a social network site,” with only 13% of users reporting doing that in a typical day. Of course, social networking is primarily a youth-based phenomenon, not impacting at a high level users above the age of 35. That number will be the one to watch change most significantly over the next several years, obviously.

Another somewhat interesting statistic: 30% of Internet users don’t actually get online in a typical day. I may spend 10-12 hours a day at my computer, so it’s hard to imagine that there really are a lot of people that don’t feel the need to login everyday. Even my old-as-hell parents get online every day.

Many of the gaps in these sweeping polls can be easily traced to income, education, and age differences. Younger high-income high-educated users spend more time on search engines and more time on the Internet in general. We don’t need a study to figure that out. It will be interesting to see how lower-income web usage changes over time. But it is obvious that connectivity to the Internet and success in business and school go hand in hand. The first step in bringing people up is to get them online.

And it’s not just being connected, but having a high-speed connection, that makes the difference. As the study’s author Deborah Fallows says, “Of all the demographic variables we analyzed, the presence of a home broadband connection had the strongest relationship with a user’s propensity to use a search engine on a typical day.”

For search engine marketing, this is good news. Not only is search engine usage increasing steadily, but the demographics of a search engine user tend to fit right in with those a marketer would want to target: young and wealthy.

Story via Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 12:52 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.