Comments on: Search Queries Are Getting Longer: Hitwise Report

By: Ian Macfarlane

Ian Macfarlane — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:00:05 +0000

Here’s the HTML version of the above on the Hitwise site:
http://www.hitwise.com/press-center/hitwiseHS2004/google-searches-jan-09.php

For some reason, they’ve made a press releases page for 2009, but not updated the navigation so you can’t get to it easily – just go to the 2008 archive page and change the URL so it says “2009″ instead.

By: Phoebe

Phoebe — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:10:42 +0000

If users are increasingly sophisticated and are using/trusting search engines for more complex tasks – and if this trend continues – will horizontal, keyword-driven search engines continue to do the job for most users? At Jinni (http://www.jinni.com) we see that users make the step surprisingly quickly to taking advantage of the possibilities of natural language search for movies and TV shows.

By: LC - BayshoreBlogger

LC - BayshoreBlogger — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:18:19 +0000

We are defintely finding this the case with our clients, by analyzing the keyword report in our analytics programs. Not only increasing in number of keywords, but also increasing additiion of the geo-modifier to them. Agreed with Jeff above as well.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 05:36:52 +0000

This trend may not be entirely user-driven. Search engines have gotten better at ranking relevant long-tail results. Additionally, as competition becomes almost insurmountable for the short-tail, more SEOs are designing their web pages around the long-tail… which tend to convert better anyway.