John Battelle shared some interesting search engine usage stats [1] courtesy of Gian Fulgoni of comScore. According to John’s source at comScore, 28% of searchers account for 68% of searches. This comes close to following the 80/20 rule — a bit surprising, don’t you think?
Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine expounds further on comScore findings, thanks to the notes [2] he took while attending Gian’s presentation last month at the Web 2.0 conference. According to Jeff, comScore also analyzed brandshare among different types of searchers. They found that heavy searchers look at online retail sites like Walmart, Overstock, Cosco and Amazon, with the low-cost leaders on top. So, I guess you can conclude that heavy searchers are bargain hunters. But do they have a high customer lifetime value, or not? THAT’S the question I’d really like answered!