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

Re:Mac users

[sm3ggy]

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

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 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: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.

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?

[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 ;)