Despite mounting concerns about privacy following the recent consolidation of about 70 or so policies, Google is far and away the dominant search engine. As a part of its Internet and American Life Project, Pew on Friday released a report about search engines, putting Google at the top of the heap, used by 83 percent of those polled by the organization.
To gather its results, Pew conducted phone interviews with 2,253 Americans age 18 and older.
It found that Google's not-so-close second is Yahoo, which is claimed by a miniscule 6 percent of users. Pew last asked about people's preferred search engines in 2004, and since then Google has made major gains, jumping from 47 percent. Yahoo, by contrast, has fallen significantly from its 26 percent share eight years ago.
Overwhelmingly, respondents are happy with the performance of search engines – 91 percent said they find what they're looking for "always or most of the time." They're also generally satisfied with the reliability of the data they find, with 73 percent saying they feel that the data they find on search engines is "accurate and trustworthy."
Though 66 percent reported that search engines are fair and unbiased, Google has recently faced accusations of favoring its own content in search. At the beginning of the year, it began rolling out a new search initiative dubbed Search Plus Your World. With this search update, Google taps into results from its own Google+ social network, which prompted the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) to file a letter with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), requesting that it investigate the changes.
Pew's results seem to echo EPIC's concerns. The organization also asked users how they feel about search engines collecting their personal information to improve results. Seventy-two percent of respondents said they're not okay with a search engine keeping track of their searches in order to personalize results – they feel it's an invasion of privacy. Less than a quarter (23 percent) told Pew they approve of the practice.
Sixty-eight percent of people disapproved of targeting advertising because they don't want to be tracked, while 28 percent said they liked it because they feel they get better results about the things they're interested in.
Feelings aside, pretty much everyone uses search engines, Pew said. About three-fourths (73 percent) of all Americans use them, up from 52 percent in 2002. On any given day, Pew said 59 percent are using search engines, compared to 30 percent in 2004.
For more from Leslie, follow her on Twitter @LesHorn.
For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.
No comments:
Post a Comment