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the folks at pew internet just released a gem of a study on internet search engine users who appear to swim in schools through the same information….the report was put together by deborah fallows…

you can read the whole thing in a big pdf file at the pew site…and of course, for those of you with the attention span of a nuclear-family-child, here are a few salient points: “Internet users are extremely positive about search engines and the experiences they have when searching the internet. But these same satisfied internet users are generally unsophisticated about why and how they use search engines…also strikingly unaware of how search engines operate.”

…and as for the battle between elGoog and those other indurate search mongers, here’s a little intellectual fodder that you can toss out at parties to score chicks (or scare them away, depends on the crowd…) “Some 44 percent of searchers regularly use just one engine, and another 48 percent use just two or three. Nearly half of searchers use a search engines no more than a few times a week, and two-thirds say they could walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives very much…Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or sponsored results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not…55 percent of searchers say about half the information they search for is important to them and half is trivial.”

uh, that last comment begs this question, “if richard scarry were to update his “what do people do all day?” book for children, would it show moms and dads at work shopping for crap online or playing fantasy football? (jim is a fireman…nancy is a doctor…and jill the office manager is looking for new bedding on a shiny office computer!)

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