Study: 80-Percent Of Searches Are Informational, 20% Are Navigational Or Transactional

Apr 10, 2008 at 10:37am ET by Barry Schwartz

A Penn State research study showed that about 80-percent of searches are informational in nature, whereas 10-percent are navigational and another 10-percent are transactional.

The researchers reviewed over 1.5 million queries from hundreds of thousands of search engines users to prove the “80/20 rule that 80 percent of the cases can be achieved with these clear-cut methods,” said IST assistant professor Jim Jansen.

Jansen said his study is 74-percent accurate and hopes to improve the accuracy rate to a 90-percent yield.

How does he define each type of search?

Informational searching involves looking for a specific fact or topic
Navigational searching seeks to locate a specific web site
Transactional searching looks for information related to buying a particular product or service

For the complete paper, go here.

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Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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