Recap. I found an great article by The Seattle Times from 2005 about the growing importance of internet search, how it effects our lives and how search engines help us in our daily quest for information. Most of the numbers are outdated, but the basic info where search is headed is still true today. Here are a couple of facts I found interesting:

• Three quarters of U.S. Internet users, or about 120 million people, have used engines, searching an average of 38 times a month.
• As a business, search brought in $4 billion in sales last year, and will become a bigger cash cow as its power and influence grows.
• Microsoft found that people search an average of 11 minutes before they find what they are looking for.
• The first search engine was created in 1990 by a college student in Montreal and named “Archie” — a variation on the word archive. There wasn’t even much of a Web at that point, and Archie was mainly used to dig through public file-exchange sites.
• Google is the most popular engine today, home to 35 percent of Web searches. It receives hundreds of millions of requests every day.
• Google hit the $1 billion quarterly sales mark in 2004, just five years after its official launch.
• Search engines are going after more eyeballs by adding their own content, and now offer users street maps, phone numbers, weather forecasts and even answers to algebra problems. Many also offer separate search-based shopping and news services.
• Web users add more public information daily. A group of University of California researchers estimated the size of the public Web at least tripled from 2000 to 2003, when it contained 167 terabytes of data. That’s equal to about 560,000 sets of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
• Experts say the search technology will jump digital boundaries from the browser to other platforms. Its next stop is the cellphone; in the future, television.

Tags: Internet, Search, statistics