The end of search is a theme that’s been talked about a lot in the past – as long ago as in Feb 2008, Ben Kunz of Media Associates produced a series of graphs from Google Trends showing that search volumes were significantly down for a range of what you might call staple terms – music, furniture, office supplies etc.

Some of it is wishful thinking as many of us wish for the age of Google to start drawing to a close (whether the age of Facebook is any better is of course a different matter altogether).

And the latest Nielsen search stats from the US show that Google is as dominant as ever, controlling almost 2/3 (64.2%) of the search market – a share that’s hardly changed since last year, despite all the new bells and whistles that Microsoft’s Bing (on 13.6%) has been rolling out.

It’s the second table from the Nielsen post however that makes for more interesting reading. Over the past year, search activity is down 16% – 17% in the case of Google. Yahoo! (-30%) performed particularly badly, though despite it’s still small share Bing (+28%) has done well. So all those extra features are paying off after all.

OK, so with almost nine million searches being conducted in the US in July, search is certainly not dead. But a drop of close to a fifth year on year is still significant, and one explanation has to be that people get more and more of what they need and want via social media. There is that research from earlier in the year after all about Facebook now driving more traffic to major news and entertainment portals than Google.

At the very least it reinforces what Comscore found last year – that search and social media campaigns now need to work very much in tandem, with a paid search campaign supported by social activity being 2.23x more effective than if conducted on its own.

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Search engines make you smarter, so say researchers from Penn State University (via Science Daily).    Well…kind of.   But they don’t make you stupid as Nicholas Carr claimed in his seminal Atlantic Magazine article last year.

Researchers looked at search habits of 72 participants engaging in 426 tasks.   Rather than search being used to find out new stuff, search engines were “primarily used for fact checking users’ own internal knowledge.”   According to the academics, that means that search is actually part of our own internal learning process.

Hence the fears about students for example getting lazy and just using Google rather than their brains to find out answers might be incorrect.  Instead, Google, Bing et al support “higher level information needs”, i.e to increase the chances that we get the right answer and to put detail on things we already know.

That makes sense if you look at how search habits are evolving, in particular lengthening.   Last week Hitwise’s Asia-Pacific analyst Alan Long put out a post on lengthening search terms.   Something that Hitwise says is an international trend – one and two word searches have gone down over the past three years and 3+ word searches have gone up.

People already have a fair idea of what they are after when they go to search, hence more specific searches.  As a result, search is as much to validate and build on existing knowledge as to find new one.

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The other day I posted about what marketing agencies see as a measure of viral video success. Unbelievably over a quarter peg the success rate at a million views or more, which to me seems like a case of taking the big number and plucking it out of thin air.

Why? Because getting up to 50k is an achievement given the thousands of brand films that languish on YouTube with several hundred views.

As new research from TubeMogul shows, even though video sharing sites host the actual films, less than half (45%) of us now discover content by browsing through these sites. Which could be why ‘featured’ clips on YouTube used to get 500,000 views, but now often don’t reach 100,000.

Where does the other 55% come from?

Search engines: 11.18%,
Social networks: 3.66%,
Social bookmarking sites: 3.19%,
Video search engines: 0.63%,
Email/IM: 0.05%

“Everything else (almost all blogs, from the thousands we scanned): 80.88% of all referred traffic.”

In other words, forget about seeding your video on specialist video search engines, or hoping people will forward it on by email. Blogs and online media are the key to success. Or, according to TubeMogul:

”These results likely come as bad news to the myriad sites that are set up with online video discovery in mind, such as video search engines, which source a relatively modest 0.63% of all referred video views.

”To those trying to unlock a formula for making a video go viral, perhaps this gives some clues: reach out to bloggers and optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it ranks highly on intra-video site plugs.”

Image – Kimba