Google Users more Wealthy, Net Savvy

evil_breeds writes "A study by S.G. Cowen & Co. says that Google users tend to be richer and have more Internet experience than users of the other search engines, including Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft's search, according to an article on Infoworld."

Comments

Google makes you smarter

[alchamy]

Since the first time I started using google it has always impressed me, the ease of use and accurate search results were just the beginning.

For me the best thing about Google is that you can use regular expressions in your search strings which really gives you the best possible results, sure other search engines allow expressions but none as complex or effective as those found in google.

Whenever I need to know something or understand something better I do a quick google and within minutes I have the information I need.

I can think of several occasions where something gets mentioned in a meeting etc and I honestly have no clue what people are talking about, while they are still talking I can do a quick google and be back on track within seconds. The "define word" function is one of my favorite ways to get quick answers.

Other search engines just don't do it for me, the results are not nearly as accurate and the excess adverts/banners slowing down the entire process really annoy me.

A google user truely has the world at his/her fingertips.

Re:Google makes you smarter

[alchamy]

Perhaps it was a bit bold to say regular expressions, its more permutations since it supports words and not letters.

But you can do things like "word * word"

You can also do something like this

"(I|He|She) (can|may|will) (search|find|locate)"

I agree with you that they would never (not atm) allow the public to have access to something that is turing-complete.

Re:Mac users

[sm3ggy]

http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/1403 581 There is a citation for you.

Correlation != Cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing to see here folks. Move along.

Either wrong or article is missing something

[broothal]

From tfa: "The longer people have been using the Internet, the more likely it is that Google will be their search engine of choice" and "people whose primary search engine is Google are more likely to have household incomes above US$60,000"

  You can't conclude that. It's like saying "I'm left handed. I like linux. Therefore, all left handed like linux". What they have found out is, that people with more experience has a higher paid job. There's no statistical evidence tying it to their search engine of choice.

"Google also emerged as the search engine of choice, with 52 percent of respondents choosing it as their primary engine for general Web searches. Yahoo came in second with 22 percent, while Microsoft's MSN and AOL tied for third place with 9 percent."

That survery is good to see which search engine is the most popular. Google obviously is. But if you only have 9% MSN users in your statistical material, then you can't compare them. You need to compare groups of similar size.

Re:Either wrong or article is missing something

[santiago]

From tfa: "The longer people have been using the Internet, the more likely it is that Google will be their search engine of choice" and "people whose primary search engine is Google are more likely to have household incomes above US$60,000"

    You can't conclude that. It's like saying "I'm left handed. I like linux. Therefore, all left handed like linux". What they have found out is, that people with more experience has a higher paid job. There's no statistical evidence tying it to their search engine of choice.

Yes, you can conclude that. The phrase "more likely" does not imply causation, merely correlation. If the data you gather shows that two factors are correlated then, without even trying to construct a causation model for this correlation, you can use one as a predictor of the other. The article is merely saying that the longer a randomly-selected user has been using the internet the likelier it is they use Google, and that the fraction of Google users with incomes over $60,000 is higher than the fraction of non-Google users with incomes over $60,000.

That survery is good to see which search engine is the most popular. Google obviously is. But if you only have 9% MSN users in your statistical material, then you can't compare them. You need to compare groups of similar size.

No, you don't. There is no statistical requirement that various groups you are trying to compare be of similar size in order to make comparisons. There is only a requirement that all your groups be sufficiently large to have a high likelihood of being representative of the population from which they are being drawn. WIth 1000 users and 9% MSN that's only 90 users, which is probably not enough to draw broad conclusions about MSN's user base, but the study as a whole seems to be mostly comparing the 52% Google users to the 48% non-Google users. That certainly seems like a reasonable number of samples to support the conclusion that Google use, technical experience, and income are all positively correlated.

bad news dude...

[way2trivial]

um-- you have ad/trojan/spyware.. I had this exact same thing..
in made my google results always have commercial sites turn up in/mixed in with the results.
looked really good- but none of the adslime had cached version links available

Re:Google was good, going down?

[Narc]

teoma.com is pretty nifty, doesnt sneak in sponsored links. Clean interface.

Re:Google was good, going down?

[OmnipotentEntity]

I think what the grandparent mistook for ads are the misspellings links.

For example, if you do a search for "profit" it will give you 3 links to sites, then ask if you meant "pro fit" and give you 3 links from there, and then finish out the rest of the page with results from "profit."

It looks suspiciously cluttered for google, and I also mistook them for ads the first time I saw them.

Re:Google was good, going down?

[gaurzilla]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q= prescription&btnG=Search This is probably what he means.

Re:Google was good, going down?

[Paraplex]

Google have put a couple of 'neat' things in their search engine, but the web is seeming smaller and smaller because of their pagerank system.

I believe a search like "stumbleto's" search is along the right path. Its not there yet, but based on a database of your liked and disliked pages it could essentially understand a "context". eg if you search for "Birds" you're going to get all of the pages relating to real birds ranked far higher than pages relating to "hot birds". You're also going to get sites that agree with your disposition toward the subject (eg. bird-hate sites would rank a lot lower because there are more links between separate bird-like sites and fewer linking this cluster to a cluster of bird-hate sites)

Furthermore I think searches (image searches specifically) should be tagged and have their ranks change dynamically as visitors visit the sites. So an image or a website that is clicked on under the search terms "native bird" will be tagged as such and relationally linked to other pages creating a community context and therefore ranking more relevant items higher.
Users should have a limited ability to moderate searches by selectively nuking items which are irrelevant to the search terms which in turn would change the tags associated with it

Anyway, I think context based personalised searching is where the future of searching is at and stumbleto has the headstart on this.

Re:Google was good, going down?

[Sean0michael]

Firefox does have an extension that pretty much does what you want it to do. It's called CustomizeGoogle. It works through 1.6~, features lots of customizability (my own word there) and has been given reviews as one of the best extensions to Firefox.

Get the extension here https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=743&application=firefox

That is, assuming you use Firefox ;)