Book Note: The Search
Posted on Sunday, November 13, 2005
at 8:30 PM (permalink)
After a long day of Ruby coding it's time for a little bedtime reading. Here's another installment of the abridged version of "The Search." Much of this chapter is a recounting of lost opportunities with search engines that preceded Google, which I'll spare you, but there are some fascinating factoids about search and some interesting insights.
Chapter 2. Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How (Much)
At the end of the day, the holy grail of all search engines is to decipher your true intent--what you are looking for, and in what context. ... When you type in a one-word query for "York," for example, do you want results for "New York"? Most likely the answer is no. (p. 23)
[Indexing the Web] is no small task: by most accounts Google alone has more than 750,000 computers dedicated to the job. (p. 24)
Pew estimates that on any gven day in the United States, 38 million people are using a search engine. All those searches add up to nearly 4 billion queries each month. (p. 25)
Piper Jaffray estimates that the world conducted about 550 million searches each day in 2003. (p. 26)
From its inception as a business in the late 1990s to 2004, paid search as an industry grew from a base in the low millions to $4 billion in revenue, and it is estimated to hit $23 billion by 2010, according to Piper Jaffray. (p. 234)
Google alone boasts more than 225,000 unique advertiser relationships. (p. 35)
According to a report from Dieringer Research Group, nearly 100 million people made purchases after doing online research in 2003, and nearly 115 million searched for product information. (p. 36)
