Google’s Autocomplete function burst onto the search scene in 2008, having been born and raised in Labs under the name Google Suggest. Searchers are now very familiar with its function of listing the search phrases it thinks you’re likely to be typing. It saves us time, corrects our spelling mistakes and helps us think of the rest of the phrase we want to use.

It works by using data on the most popular searches and then predicting the one being typed at any time as the user enters each character. The system is localised and personalised to the user and time-sensitive, meaning that “trending” search phrases quickly enter the suggestions when they are being searched in larger volumes than any others.

This process means we can therefore get an insight into the UK’s search habits by quantifying the suggested results Google presents. There are of course an endless amount of suggestions (many of them fascinating, funny or just worrying) so for this examination, I have chosen to look only at the suggested searches presented upon typing each single letter of the alphabet and single numbers. For each letter and number there are 10 suggestions in order of popularity. This method is not perfect by any means because it gives a skewed set of results – one word searches are the most probable entries based on the evidence of a single letter and therefore most suggestions are single words. As we know, there is a large percentage of searches that use more than one word (in the US, about 70% of searches are longer) but one word searches are the largest single group. Results however do get skewed towards one word suggestions and therefore names of companies, organisations, websites and people get an advantage. The data is still useful and interesting in this regard as we can see which names among this skewed group are favoured more.

The following is the analysis of the data gathered in October 2012 from Google.co.uk. We took the 10 suggested searches for 26 letters and 10 numerals and categorised the terms into the below groups. Note that the data does not show any weighting so while “bbc news” and “6 music” are both at the top of their respective lists and receive equal billing in our data, the former has a far greater volume. Therefore, our categorisation of data helps to tell us variety within a category but can’t accurately show dominance of one category over another. For example, only a handful of News sources are queried and it gets equal billing to Weather, yet traffic to news sites from search is greater.

What’s quite clear from the data is that Entertainment and Retail are the dominant uses of the internet. Online Services are significant, however. These are usually brands like “Dropbox”, “Google” and “Skype” but also general terms like “currency converter”. Nearly all other categories are marginal in comparison.

We’ve therefore broken down Entertainment and Retail into sub-categories to get a closer look at people’s interests.

Above is an interesting breakdown of the UK’s leisure interests, as they are expressed online. Gaming/gambling was so big we decided to subdivide it to show its component parts. It’s sad to see books only just getting in at 2% and even that was “50 Shades of Grey” in the uncompetitive “5” suggestions. I’d say this illustrates the long tail nature of search in books and reading, which is largely a solitary pursuit with hundreds of years of titles available to read at any time. TV, Film, Gaming and Music are much more skewed to what is showing at a given time and what is new.

In Retail, the landscape is less varied. Fashion dominates the sector and even when we’ve given Department Stores, Supermarkets and Online Giants (Amazon, eBay), who have fashion offerings, their own sub-categories. Again, this is arguably to do with variety where many brands can co-exist. In contrast, Entertainment sees fewer sites (Game, HMV, Toys R Us etc) appearing, reflecting the smaller number of major players and perhaps a market that has been losing out to digital formats and alternative methods of distribution.

Finally, as an alternative view, we’ve recreated the breakdown using only the first suggested search term. This gives us a view of just the top 36 terms by alphanumeric entry.

Even with this view Retail and Entertainment stand out. Technology gains a lot of ground but this is because many technology brands and terms tend to start with numbers: “3” (Three, the mobile operator), “7zip” and “O2” appears both for the letter O and numeral 0.

The above data is perhaps no surprise to anyone who’s seen other internet usage data and just underlines the fact that the dominant use of the internet in the UK is for shopping and fun. This is also borne out by the growth of online business in the past few years; much of which falls into these sectors. The Entertainment category is interesting. We know that people have been turning away from traditional media such as TV and radio but internet services to replace these media are still being formed and struggling to catch up with demand. It’s only recently that internet TV, on demand and streaming services are hitting the mainstream, yet the public appetite for it is already huge. First movers like Netflix are therefore seeing fantastic responses to their exclusive offerings. Retail has been better at reacting and developing an online presence and service. This is perhaps due to a greater security in investment where they don’t have to battle with piracy of their content and entry costs are lower, not requiring as much investment in the technological delivery of their product.

On Tuesday 15^th January Facebook launched Graph Search; a dramatic overhaul of their search function and for all intents and purposes, a new type of search.  For me it’s the biggest change to search since real time search arrived. But it’s only the beginning of that change: Graph Search is still in beta and US only. That hasn’t stopped a torrent of coverage and analysis from hitting the internet, all for a service that hardly anyone has had first-hand experience of. For this post I want to skip past the discussions about the impact on Facebook, its users, privacy, how it will work etc and go straight to the principal behind it: what is mostly being called Social Search. Firstly, I think it’s important to make it clear exactly what it is, for there are a few misconceptions arising already even among recognised experts. I turn to the ever-reliable Danny Sullivan for his neat summary: “With a typical Google search, the objects we search for are web pages, with the connections (or graph) that help determine the pages that rise to the top primarily being links from across the web.” Links, simple form, are like votes, helping Google decide which are the most popular pages to show for a particular topic. With Facebook Graph Search, the objects we search for aren’t web pages but instead virtual representations of real world objects: people, places and things. The connections are primarily Facebook Likes. Did such-and-such a person like a particular photo? A particular doctor? A particular restaurant? Those likes are the ties that bind the information in Facebook together. So this new type of search is comparable to data mining. Rather than searching the web, users are querying a database and using pre-set functionality based on the limits of the data available. For me, this seems to be a huge potential blow to Google. Their focus for years has been on learning about the searcher and the meaning of his or her queries. Now, they are threatened with search splitting into 2 types: asking the search engine and asking the social network. Currently, Google has no answer to this new type that will surely rob it of a significant amount of traffic. For this new type of search to work it must enable search behaviour to evolve to a point where we habitually seek other humans’ opinions rather than written web content. This could be said to be similar to an existing and now ubiquitous search habit of adding overview after a company or product name, so perhaps it will be an easy transition. Perhaps Facebook’s biggest challenge is indeed in creating this mass habit that doesn’t currently exist. Search consultants Distilled did a couple of nice videos last week where the “habit” question comes up. Another question is even if the habit is formed, will it break out of Facebook-only use and impact other search engines? Mediarun’s Martin Soule thinks so: “We should expect to see this habit carry over to Google too. Firstly a Bing search bar is rumoured to be implanted into the bottom of the Facebook search results page. I think people will take their new habits into Google too.” So whether Google are launching a rival service or not, they’ll possibly be seeing the queries from their users. So what will Google’s response be? It seems inevitable that they will have a rival offering in 2013. Google+ is already set up to gather these connections between people and the things they like. Although the Google+ userbase is only about a quarter of Facebook’s Google’s advantage comes from the fact it is openly connected to the rest of Google and can mine many more sources for data. Google+ also has Communities which are groups of fans/experts on any nominated subject (they replaced Sparks from the original G+ build) which offer another possibility: the ability to query a specialist community for their connections to objects. For example, what is the most popular news app among the Android community on Google+? This is an area Facebook isn’t very strong in and Google could quickly find a niche here. This is in fact one of the major reason Google+ exists and I wrote a blog post in 2011 discussing it, using the term “social signal aggregator“. So is this what we”ll see happen in the early days of social search? A number of companies all occupying niches based on the demographic and behaviour of their user base? Can anyone dominate? Facebook are out of the blocks first but if search limited to Facebook only then it won’t win. There are lots of things people don’t see fit to discuss on Facebook in front of their friends. Google+ is also limited by its demographic but because it is a “layer” over many Google properties, it is able to see more about a profile’s behaviour on other sites. Twitter is best positioned to be the place for any real-time social searches but it also contains a huge volume of social signals in the form of links in tweets that can be interpreted as user recommendations. I’m sure partnerships will be formed and data shared to create stronger offerings. There will no doubt be developments that no one imagines happening right now. For me, this is the most exciting development in search for many years.

Almost a year ago now Yahoo teamed up with Nectar to produce a search bar which earns you Nectar points for every search you make. At first glance this looked like an innovative way for Yahoo to claw back some of the market share that it has been losing to Google. In December 2009 Yahoo commanded a 14% share of the UK search engine market (source www.impactmedia.co.uk) as of last month this share has been almost completely eclipsed by Bing’s growth and Google’s incredible market dominance and had shrunk to 2.86%. Clearly enlisting Nectar’s help had done nothing to stem the tide so what went wrong? For Yahoo, or indeed any other search engine, to make any real ground on Google there is a lot more work that needs doing. I used the toolbar to make searches and build up my stock of Nectar points over the last month, almost 30 days after I downloaded the toolbar I had used it for a grand total of 2 days and collected only 69 points and I am back using Google with relish! Unfortunately for both Yahoo and Nectar all this experience has highlighted to me is that Yahoo is not particularly user friendly or, indeed, that pleasing to the eye. Plus, in my view it is simply made too complicated to collect Nectar points online! Obviously, Yahoo and Nectar needed to limit the amount of points they were going to be giving to people or they would have had people like me doing hundreds of searches a day just to rack up a few extra points. Limiting it to 50 points a month, however, removes most of the incentive from the initiative. It is still free money but at £3 a year for using a search engine, I can’t see anyone bothering! My advice to Yahoo would be to work on making their site look a bit more up to date. The whole concept still looks like it hasn’t been updated since it was first created in 1994. It is a real shame that a company that started something innovative and forward thinking doesn’t seem to have remained that way. They always seem to come in a step behind Google causing their market share to drop at an alarming rate. I wonder how long they have left.