What type of searching is more common: web search (using Google, Yahoo, et al) or searching within a site?
The number of web searches done daily is approximately 200 million. Google gets about half of those about 90 million. At SLI we serve site search for only a tiny fraction of all web sites but on some days we serve over 20 million site search queries. This indicates to me that there are significantly more site search than web search queries .
You can look at this another way – look at the most popular sites on the internet – a few of the top sites are search engines – Yahoo, Google, MSN – then you start getting into myspace, ebay, amazon, craigslist and youtube – a lot of people using those will be doing searches on those sites.
When you start looking down the list of top sites and you realize that almost all of these has a site search, it quickly becomes evident that site search must occur a lot more than web search. My guess is that there would be at least an order of magnitude more site searches done, .i.e. more than 2 billion/day!
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Site search, in my view represents Web 3.0, next wave of e-commerce for a very simple reason: people search on Google, Yahoo! or MSN are more information driven, less commerce-driven. Site search is commerce-driven. Because people search items on Wal-Mart.com are to buy something from the site. They are not looking for information. The challenge for big brand names today is not how to pay Google/Yahoo!/MSN to be included in their search engine. It is how to enhance their customers’ online shopping experience. that’s why I believe site search engines like Endeca, Autonomy and FAST will continue to grow in a much faster pace than the BIG 3.
I think site search is important for e-commerce and information sites like amazon or wikipedia , espally for big sites with many thousand of pages. For all other small companies privates it is not important.
This is all very nice, but what can you do to profit from this knowledge.