December 5, 2008
Google has published their list of the top search terms for the year:
Top 10 searches on google.co.nz in 2008
- games
- bebo
- youtube
- trade me
- lyrics
- map
- hotmail
- tv
- weather
Half of these are site specific brand names (in bold) - meaning that rather than using Google the person doing the search could have simple added .com or .co.nz to the term and entered the URL directly into their browser and found the site they were looking for directly.
(the same trick would actually also work with most of the other terms too, but it’s not so obvious that people searching for these things were after the corresponding .com)
The one that will really surprise many web developers, I suspect, is “Google” itself - the sixth most popular search this year.
How do you explain that? What’s the mental model those users have of the web and of search engines specifically?
Most technology people will, I suspect, find it difficult to understand the sort of person who does this sort of search, but that’s exactly what we need to do if we’re going to build products these people will like to use and will tell their friends about.