Why Do People Google “Internet”?

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.