Most Popular Search Engines and Search Terms 2005

Another year of search is coming to an end and it's always interesting to look back. What better way to get an idea of what people are looking for than the top search terms for search engines? Looking at what other people are searching for can give us an idea of what's hot and what's not on the search engines.

AOL and Lycos offer us a glimpse into their users search minds. It shows that two different search engines can have very different users. Look at the lists of popular search terms from AOL and Lycos below:

Top Search Terms on AOL in 2005

Now that we know each search engine may not have the same user, we know that we may need to plan our search engine campaigns differently. In this case the best practice of testing, testing, testing holds true. We would suggest testing different messages for each search engine to see what works best for that particular search engine user.

What were the most popular search engines?

Now that we know what they are looking for we can focus our attention on the most popular search engines for 2005. What were the most popular search engines? Google comes out on top with nearly half of all search engine searches. In October alone there were nearly 5.1 billion web searches in the US.

As a note of caution it seems that each research company has it's own figures for total searches and number of user's searching, and the figures sometimes very widely. The one thing that stays standard from one research report to the next is the ranking of the search engines.

Most Popular Search Engines of 2005*

Top Search Engines of 2005

* Source Nielsen//NetRatings for the month of October 2005