Searching Now No. 2 Internet Task
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The number of people who use Internet search engines to find information has jumped over the last year, claiming a solid No. 2 spot behind e-mail among online tasks, a new study finds.
Of the 94 million American adults who went online on a given autumn day this year, 63 percent used a search engine, compared with 56 percent in June 2004, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said Sunday.
Until recently, search and news have been running neck-and-neck for the No. 2 spot among Internet tasks, said Lee Rainie, the project's director. But search had a dramatic jump over the past year to widen the gap over news, used by 46 percent of the Internet's daily population.
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Use of search engines was higher among users who are richer and better educated, as well as those with high-speed broadband connections that are continuously on.
"If you're cooking dinner and wondering what ingredients to put in your meal, if you had a dial-up connection you would probably go to your cookbook," Rainie said. "If ... you have a broadband connection, you'd likely go to your bookmarks" for your favorite search engine.
E-mail remains the most popular application, used by 77 percent of the daily sampled population.
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Separate tracking by comScore Media Metrix finds that users averaged 24 minutes a day on e-mail, compared with less than 4 minutes for search. Pew researchers note that the gap signals that e-mail remains a powerful application.
Nonetheless, although the number of daily e-mail users has grown because of increases in the overall online population, the percentage of the daily population accessing e-mail has dropped. It was 85 percent in the 2004 survey.
Rainie suggests users might have grown fearful of viruses and other threats spread via e-mail, or they might have turned to instant messaging instead. He also speculates that they might simply suffer from information overload and conscientiously limit their e-mail use.
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The random telephone-based survey of 1,577 Internet users was conducted Sept. 13 to Oct. 14. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.