Each month, users conduct more than 100 billion searches on search engines globally. And every day, a portion of the searches they perform involve queries that have never been made before.
Those facts are widely cited, but fewer marketers are aware that at least a third of all searches conducted are from query terms unique to each search engine, such as Bing or Google. (According to Microsoft’s, my employer’s, internal research.)
Why all these unique queries?
There are more than 7.3 billion people on this planet — each one of them unique. While those that are online often have popular searches, such as “Facebook” or “Craigslist,” in common, they also have millions of ways to uniquely express their needs to search engines. For example, if we both had a water pipe burst, you may search for “plumber” while I may search for “fix water leak.”
Custom comScore research from December 2015 indicates that 60 million US users exclusively use Bing. Since these people have certain demographic and psychographic characteristics, according to our data, some use different terms from those who use Google or other engines.
Other people who use Bing (and our partner networks) may also use Google, but our research suggests that users are in a unique mindset when engaging with a certain search engine. So it follows that they may use unique search terms in keeping with their mindset. Interestingly, our 2013 research suggests that people frequently use a single search engine when completing a particular task. It’s only when they are changing tasks or environments that they consider changing search engines.
A reflection of these unique queries can be seen in each search engine’s auto-suggestion of query terms. Bing and Google will algorithmically make different suggestions as a result of the types of queries popular on their platform.
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