Average Query Length on Major Search Engines, February 2010
With the increase on popularity of Internet access, people use the Web for almost everything. Web search engines are used as recipe books, calculators, encyclopedias, howto’s, DYI references, and so on.
In the last years users became better at formulating their queries and it is kind of funny to think that at the beginning they were typing queries like “could you please find for me a recipe for apple pie?”.
Here are some query length statistics from 2006, 2007, and 2009.
But how good/bad are people in writing queries today? What is the distribution of the lengths? Does it vary between search engines?
This morning I decided to investigate that. After the analysis of some log files, here are some updated statistics as of February 2010:
| Bing | Ask | Yahoo | ||
| 1 | 26.79% | 46.76% | 49.90% | 54.15% |
| 2 | 23.39% | 18.81% | 13.03% | 18.11% |
| 3 | 18.72% | 15.92% | 16.09% | 12.31% |
| 4 | 12.78% | 8.40% | 6.72% | 7.08% |
| 5 | 8.23% | 5.23% | 6.42% | 3.73% |
| 6 | 4.55% | 1.94% | 3.77% | 2.47% |
| 7 | 2.76% | 1.40% | 0.71% | 0.97% |
| 8 | 1.36% | 0.71% | 2.24% | 0.68% |
| 9 | 1.02% | 0.77% | 0.81% | 0.33% |
| 10 | 0.41% | 0.06% | 0.31% | 0.18% |
| avg. length | 2.93 | 2.27 | 2.39 | 2.06 |
(Disclaimer: while I did my best to compute those statistics, due to increasingly high privacy constraints they were made on a relatively small sample of queries and therefore could be not perfectly accurate.)
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