What are People Searching for Online?
September 3, 2021
The average person now spends almost 10 hours a day online: 5 billion Google searches are performed on the internet each day! Search engines are here to satiate our curious minds. We’ve become accustomed to “Google” something to get a question answered or to learn more about a particular topic. While Google is not the only search engine available, we certainly know that it is the most popular and a favorite for the majority of internet users. According to Similarweb, Google has been visited 62.19 billion times in 2021. Every day, billions of users rely on google for their searches.
There are a number of tools we can look at to answer the question “what are people searching for online?”. However, just looking at the number of searches and the queries used doesn’t give us a complete answer. Sometimes, multiple searches need to be performed to get to the answer we are seeking out. However, all the searches certainly provide us with massive amounts of data that can be analyzed for trends, such as the topics people are interested in learning more about. The phrasing internet users utilize in their searches helps search engine providers learn more about an individual’s research style, and providers can use this data to improve search algorithms so that the type of information users are looking for will be more likely to surface at the top of results. This makes it easier to get the answers search engine users are looking for. Again, while we can’t equate the exact search queries as being one-to-one correlated with the information that individuals are seeking out, it does give us a better idea of their online needs and helps us better understand what those folks are looking for.
Top 10 search engines of 2021:
According to ahrefs.com, the number one search word is youtube, followed by facebook as the second most searched for word, amazon as third for US users and google for worldwide users. It’s no wonder that branded websites ranked as the most popular! The top 10 search engines are:
Youtube
Amazon
Gmail
Yahoo
Yahoo Mail
Weather.com
Netflix
Walmart
Some may find it unusual to see email services listed among search engines that use publicly indexed content, but most internet users utilize a free email service that is accessible from their internet browser. While your emails are not publicly available on Google or Yahoo, the same sophisticated search technology that powers these services also makes it possible to find old emails using search keywords or even topics that relate to the body contents of those messages, allowing email service customers to quickly and efficiently find messages that have been buried in their inbox.
Search data also offer unique insights into national and local trends, such as which celebrities or politicians internet users are thinking about top-of-mind. Some of the answers users are looking for are far simpler and requires little in-depth research: April 2020 had a record number of searches performed for the question “what day is it?”. In a year when even that is uncertain (perhaps because of the day to day mundanity of global lockdowns?), we are fortunate that so much knowledge is just a click away.