Searching for Search Engines

From Red Herring:

What Net surfers most commonly search for on the web is pretty surprising. Most actually end up looking for search engines themselves, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. It could be that they're just lazy or don't really know what they're doing. The No. 1 search term in November 2005 was "eBay," with 13.9 million requests, followed by "Google," with 13.3 million requests. Rounding out the top five most common search terms were "Yahoo," "Mapquest," and "Yahoo.com." Fully five out of the top 10 search terms were names of actual search engines, and all of the top 10 terms were names of web sites rather than topics. The first topical search term, "weather," came in at a distant No. 23. "Whether this behavior is driven by ignorance or savvy, the end result is the same: The search engine is the focal point of the online experience for Internet users across the spectrum," said Ken Cassar, chief analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings.

SOURCE: Nielsen//NetRatings