Web Search, A Key Business Tool

Posted by Iain Fletcher | December 11, 2007

The Convera sponsored E-consultancy survey, the results of which became available last week, was deliberately aimed at a professional audience. Plenty of research has been done into the behavior of consumers but rather less on how business people use the Internet. In evangelizing the use of vertical search containing a carefully selected slice of the public Web, in addition to publisher proprietary content, we have occasionally met resistance from editors who believe that, "our audience is much too specialized, there's nothing out on the public Web that they need". A number of Convera customers have conducted their own surveys of specific audiences during the past year, and to my knowledge, all have been surprised by the extent to which specialized communities of one sort or another rely on the public Web as a business tool.

It comes as no surprise to see in the E-consultancy survey results, that 86.7% of the professionals surveyed frequently use the Web for research, and a further 11.9% use it occasionally. Only about 1% of respondents said they never, or hardly ever, used the public Web for business purposes. What was surprising was the extent to which more than half of these professionals use public search engines, more than 50% claiming to do more than 10 searches per day, and 30% conducting 20 searches a day or more.

The full Vertical Search Report 2008 can be obtained here.