Why Do People Google “Internet”?
by
on August 23, 2008,
Recently I have noticed an interesting thing in the traffic stats for Profy. Specifically I have started to notice people arriving from Google (mostly) and some other search engines after they do a search for a single word - “internet”. And since I always find it amusing when people google “Google” to get the same link they are actually on (and yes, Google is quite a popular search term) I thought that googling “internet” was equally amusing. After all, what exactly do people want to find for such a broad search term?
Strangely I have also noticed that we are getting less and less hits from search engines on the keyword “web 2.0″ but instead we are receiving a few dozens of people daily looking for “internet”. The comparison of the two search terms on the Google Insights for Search shows that my suspicion is correct and people search for “internet” much more often than they search for our darling buzzword “web 2.0″. Honestly, “web 2.0″ is actually tiny compared to the “internet” itself.
People are mostly interested in internet in the developing countries:
And the same is actually true for “web 2.0″ as well:
I believe this shows that people from the developing countries are still fascinated by the internet as they have only recently started receiving access to it. So I believe that the further technology advances and the more internet users every one of these countries have, the less people will search for either “internet” or “web 2.0″ since why would you need to search for something when it’s already there?
What else is interesting about searching for “internet”? First of all, the enormous number of results: Google has almost half a billion pages indexed as containing the word “internet” (compared to only 338 million for “web 2.0″, by the way).
This reminds me of when FriendFeed was only launched and the only thing people discussed over there was FriendFeed itself. And even though this has changed with time, I still think there must have been quite a number of users who decided not to continue with FriendFeed after they realized it was mostly a discussion board for the product people used for this discussion. So it looks like internet users are very active in creating pages about internet or mentioning internet while other things get much less attention. For example, “lyrics”, the most popular search term since 2004 of the internet users in the US, only has 230 million pages indexed for it.
Now let’s take a look at what an internet user finds when searching for “internet”? The results are partly to be expected - at least the Wikipedia pages for Internet and History of the Internet don’t surprise with their prominent highest positions.
Next comes Jupitermedia’s Internet & IT network based at internet.com - good choice of a domain still plays an important role in placing the results better in search engine results pages. Then we also see a few pages from internet-related non-profits: Internet Society and Internet Archive followed by a couple of results from books and news.
Strangely there are no results from Google’s own Knol but probably that’s because Knol does not have decent pages written about Internet at all judging from what I’ve seen over there.
Surprisingly to me no results from blogs arrive on the first at least 15 pages of the search results (I admit I’m too lazy to go any further) - and this is a very interesting fact because normally blogs get quite a lot of Google juice and are indexed perfectly so we constantly see blogs everywhere in the search results, usually right on the first page. Probably this shows that given how popular “internet” as a search term is too many SEO experts engage in a struggle to get on the first few pages and bloggers just can’t keep up.
But the question remains: I have no idea why anyone browsing the internet would bother to do the search for this particular term, not some phrase containing internet but only one word - “internet”. Do they expect to be explained how this whole thing works or do they want to get the best information resources related to the internet? I have no idea but I’d really want to understand.
Honestly, in all my own time online this is the first time I have performed the search on the “internet” - and that’s simply out of curiosity to see why people find us via this particular search term. What’s more surprising, given the fact that I have seen no blogs (and no Profy either, obviously) in the first 15 pages of results, I guess it means that those people arriving to us searching for the “internet” must be very determined to find out what we have to say about the “internet” by clicking page after page.
So I wanted to ask our readers to share their own experience and hopefully help me understand the motives of those using the internet search engines to find the “internet”, this precious something we all discuss here day after day without getting much love from Google for all our efforts. So if you have ever typed “internet” in the search bar of Google, Yahoo or whatever search engine you prefer, leave a comment and let us know what exactly you wanted to find. Better yet, let us know if you actually found what you wanted to find.
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Svetlana Gladkova
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
I google for “google” all the time when I incorrectly hit the keys to auto finish the http://www. and .com (CTRL-ENTER). I am sure this is a large reason for the “google” issue. As for searching for the “internet”, you got me.
I’ve been know to do a Google News search using only the word internet. I’m looking for news articles relating to internet neutrality, ISPs throttling practises, P2P news site ripping on ISPs, and things of that nature. Google tends to provide the sites I’m looking for, which as created less need for me to type out such lenghy result…but then again, maybe I don’t know what that fancy dancy inpernet dealy is all about.
Actually, at this speed of evolution (I mean, the speed of tech evoluation), it isn’t common to find people in their late 60’s following new technologies. In ‘almost there’ countries (haha just created this term), where they are 4 or 5 years behind new technologies, the news from “developed countries” come faster then before. They have been listening internet all the time, but they don’t realize very well the economic/politic/social benefits of it.
Frequently I’ve been asked by old relatives living in Brazil: “what is this kind of ‘ipone’ (not iPhone) that the kids are asking for?”, and other questions like “how they can make money simple clicking the mouse?”, “Why my internet doesn’t work?” (when they mean, computer). I already got my mother researching for “internet” using google and wikipedia. She told me that she was looking for how the internet can help her pupils (she is a professor for a primary school).
We are going to have a life longer than was in 20th century and we are going to have more and more people that will be unable to follow the IT evolution, “the singularity is near” :). They are not too much interested about Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook. This is outside of their concept of human relationship. They are looking for what is “internet”, how it works and how the internet can help them. I’m sure, when I get my 60’s, my kids will be doing things with some technology, unconsciously to them, but I will not understand. Hope I will have a “google” to understand.
This is my opinion.
Here’s a possible explanation: maybe people start browsing from Windows Explorer and type in ‘internet’ in the address bar to fire up their browser, but instead they start a Google query for the term?
Just a thought, can’t think of any better explanation.
Tiago, very interesting theory, your idea has made me think that the majority of such uses is actually from peopl researching what internet is and trying to figure out what to do with the entire substance now that they are in. Brilliant, I appreciate your input!
i google it sometimes because there are many things i don’t understand about it … and what cyndy is saying is an example!!
If they aren’t using any Booleon operators, any search phrase with Internet in it will bring it up as a search term. If I Google Internet Service Provider instead of “Internet Service Provider” it shows it separately in logs. People are stupid, but not that many of them.
@mubix: Perfectly true, I constantly google “Google” and I often end up in the search on Google for a website address when I was actually planning to access the site itself but forgot the .com part. But since I don’t think I’ve ever visited the Internet.com website, this problem with auto-fill is hardly true for me and hopefully for the majority of the internet users either.
@Internet: Peculiar answer, yet very humorous one
The only thing is that to get the internet-related news you only search on Google News, not the entire Google index. This actually makes perfect sense to me but it’s kind of another use case here 
@Robin: Thanks a lot for the suggestion, this one sounds like absolutely possible, quite a feasible theory. Also explains why the page of Internet Exolorer is on such a good position right at the beginning of the 2nd page.
The other day I was wondering why people would bookmark google.com on del.icio.us, Yet, 26,113 people have.
@Cyndy: True but I can’t be so sure because I have the stats for search phrases separated from the stats for search words, that’s why I tend to think some of those people actually google only the word “internet”.
@gregory: And does searching for this word only help you understand what you don’t know about it? I personally have not found anything unknown at all in the SERPs but if I search for some more specific search phrases the results do tend to be useful.
@K Welch: That’s interesting and definitely deserves a separate post
Hi Svetlana.
What tool are you using for this research (in the screenshots)..?
@Forkspoonman: It’s actually screenshots from Google’s Insights for Search (I guess I have even linked to the tool somewhere from the post but in case I have not here it is - http://www.google.com/insights/search/. Enjoy
Yeah, weird queries mix with weird people online
@mark: I got a new extremely weird search query today in the traffic stats - some 20 people arrived from the search “does the 1st amendment allow you to say anything?”