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Hitwise just released their second post on Canadians and our search patterns yesterday. It seems leading up to May 30th, 2009, 51.56% of Canadian search terms contained one or two words. The long tail is all about 3 or 4 words search and that makes up roughly 32% of the searches for the same twelve week time period. According to the post, the UK seems to veery simialr to us. However, it’s the US where the long tail of search is starting to take hold. Searches using 3 words is comparable to two words and leaves one word searches in the dustry. This begs the questions,.. why?
Delving a bit deeper, we looked at search terms sending visits to a number of categories. Shopping and Classifieds websites broadly mirror the pattern for All Categories while search terms sending visits to Travel and to News and Media websites tend to be slightly longer. By contrast, 41.87% of search terms sending Canadian visits to Banks and Financial Institutions contained one word.
One word searches for Banks and Financial Institutions makes a lot of sense since most of our banks are abbriveated to a few letters/ one to two words these days. Do you see this trend continuing in Canada? Or are we going to a future more enline with the UK & US?
Update: Check out the latest post from HItwise that follows this posts theme: What Canadians are Searching for Online
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2 Comments
Hi Duane, Thanks for picking up on our posts and we will definitely keep them coming.
I agree with you that the dominance of one word brand names contributes to one word queries. I will post the follow up today. Something that is really interesting that we noticed is that there is a larger share of non-branded searches in Canada than the US.
Let me know if there are any specific topics you’d like us to cover. I am always open to ideas.
Best, Heather
Hey Heather
Thanks for the comment. I’ve update the post with a link to your new one. Non-brand search is interesting. I wouldn’t mind seeing a post that compares our English vs French searchers in Canada. Also maybe comparing one part of the country vs the other.