Why Do People Bookmark Google.com?

Svetlana Gladkova,

on September 07, 2008,

Google.com bookmarked on Delicious Normally people use social bookmarking services like Delicious or Ma.gnolia to bookmark pages that they find interesting and to demonstrate their support to website owners by acknowledging that they find their content useful.

People also import their bookmarks from browsers to social bookmarking sites to keep them as a backup which can be useful if something unexpected happens to your browser. But there are some pages bookmarked that are simply beyond my understanding. Like when you want to do a search on Google for something normally you either type the word right into the search bar of your browser or go directly to google.com. But people actually save the URL for Google’s main page on social bookmarking sites.

A couple of weeks ago I published a post about why people google the word “internet” and one of the commentators on FriendFeed mentioned that not only people search for such strange terms, they also bookmark some pages that we all seem to know by heart anyway and he also mentioned that google.com has actually been saved on Delicious by 26,113 people (today the number increased to 26,785 so it also demonstrates some steady growth of a few hundred new saves each week).

Google saves on Delicious

In addition to that, Google.com has received 1,385 reviews on StumbleUpon and since I can only estimate how many times people clicked “thumbs up” in their StumbleUpon toolbars without adding any review, I believe the number of people “liking” Google on StumbleUpon is somewhere in the range from 10,000 to 15,000 people. I think it is an evidence of the fact that Google must have a lot of supporters among audience of social bookmarking sites - enough to make it one of the heavily-bookmarked websites.

I am a firm believer that people who have accounts on services such as Delicious are supposed to have URLs of such incredibly popular web pages right there in their memory and should not really need to save them on social bookmarking sites. Probably these people save these pages to demonstrate their appreciation of the work by Google and other giants but it nevertheless is impressive to see how many people actually bother to show their appreciation in such a manner so I have decided to do a quick research on Delicious (as still the most popular social bookmarking service) and see how some of the best-known websites do with social bookmarking communities. Here are the results of my small survey:

Numver of Delicious bookmakrs for different popular websites

Some of the results that are worth some highlight:

Among all the search engines compared here, the leading position of Google (26,786) is evident here same as anywhere else but the separation between the leader and Yahoo! (20,558) is not as huge as we would think. I doubt it could be because of Yahoo! owning Delicious but it is still interesting that Yahoo! may have a rather loyal audience willing to bookmark it heavily.
Out of the three free blogging platforms here the least popular one is strangely Google’s Blogger.com with 2,013 saves (even less popular than the declining LiveJournal with its 5,990 saves).
In the “software” group Skype seems to be more popular than Firefox while Google Chrome in less than a week received the number of saves that is less than 2 times lower than that of Mozilla.com.

One thing is no doubt interesting: the trend here is evident - all the popular websites get their fair share of saves from Delicious users and demonstrate that no matter how memorable the site name is and how hyped the name of the company behind the site is, they will still receive a decent number of attention from users of social bookmarking sites.

But social bookmarking is clearly a very recent trend that people started to use to demonstrate their attention - not only to keep track of the useful sites for themselves. I believe an evidence of this is that the sites launched after Delicious itself seem to get more attention than the sites that seem to have been here forever because people now seem to bookmark useful or interesting discoveries like Flickr or YouTube to help make sites more popular, not to memorize the names.

While the majority of these sites have become household brands already and do not really require a person to bookmark one of them to access later - simply because the names are repeated a dozen of times a day everywhere. Besides, in some cases (like for CNET’s download.com) they are easy to remember because you know what exactly you want to do - and this is exactly what you type in your browser’s address bar.

So while some people do bookmark those sites that every single web user knows anyway (like the notorious Google.com), the recently launched websites definitely receive more attention from people with strong social bookmarking habits. For example, Twitter has been bookmarked on Delicious 11,249 times but that hardly could mean that the popular micro-blogging service is almost as popular as very mainstream eBay (13,206 saves) or Amazon (13,812). I really don’t think so, I believe it simply demonstrates the fact that we have learned to bookmark websites to help them grow more popular.

But why do people still bookmark sites like Google or Amazon? I can imagine that to a certain extent these saves are because of people importing their browser bookmarks where they may have all the most often needed pages saved for quick access. And while it does not make sense to bookmark Google since it is easier to access any search results for a query using a search bar conveniently located in browser, I believe it still can be a partial explanation for the number of bookmarks for Google. Otherwise, maybe they actually also show their affection to the almighty Google. Have you ever saved Google.com on a social bookmarking site? If so, what were your reasons?

Below is the spreadsheet with the detailed results of my survey:

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23 Comments (Subscribe to rss)

Sam - September 07, 2008 at 12:34 pm PDT

Could it be because the Delicious Firefox Plugin syncs your bookmarks with Delicious? I can imagine bookmarking all those sites.
Svetlana Gladkova - September 07, 2008 at 11:28 pm PDT

Sam, this is exactly what my own suggestion is - import of bookmarks from browsers could be a good reason to have these sites bookmarked on Delicious. But to me it feels like a reason not actually enough.
Ari Herzog - September 08, 2008 at 12:34 am PDT

For many months since using the various social bookmarking sites, I’ve wondered why I’ve seen “Diggs” and “Stumbles” for google.com. It’s bewildering.

My presumptions are people bookmarking the search engine either 1) live in a country where Google is not the norm, or 2) have a bad memory.
Svetlana Gladkova - September 08, 2008 at 02:14 am PDT

Hm, Ari, bad memory is certainly an interesting theory, strange I have not thought of it myself Actually I myself live in a country where Google is not the norm (one of 4 such countries in the world last time I checked) but it is still a name well-known enough for everyone to know it - the only problem could be with spelling and this could be an additional reason for bookmarking: if I don’t know how a site’s name is spelled, you’d be safer bookmarking it if you want to access it later again.
Richard Cunningham - September 08, 2008 at 03:08 am PDT

Why is this so surprising?

If you use delicious as a kind of roaming bookmark store then why wouldn’t you bookmark these sites?

I don’t see why I would want to click, select, delete, type a 10 characters (google.com) and press enter instead of just clicking once (on a link). I remember the URLs to virtually all the sites I visit regularly, though I have them all bookmarked (though usually in the browser not on delicious).

I’m wondering if you are next going to ask why people save word processor documents when they could simply type them again
Svetlana Gladkova - September 08, 2008 at 03:16 am PDT

@Richard: My major surprise is about those links saved on Delicious, not in browser. I also have Wikipedia bookmarked (the homepage of the Russian version, that is) in my browser and I even use it to get to Wikipedia now and then. But I can hardly imaging using Delicious for quick access to the most frequently-visited websites as you’ll need to access Delicious first and then remember the tags you used to save that particular page with - just too many tasks.

And now, I’m not questioning any other activities like retyping word documents, no worries - especially since it won’t work for people with bad memory as mentioned by Ari in a comment above.
Richard Cunningham - September 08, 2008 at 03:30 am PDT

Though I think people come into a site like delicious expecting it to be more like a roaming bookmark site (like foxmarks) and perhaps don’t use it for sharing at all. The plugin for firefox makes it easier to locate bookmarks, though I think the flat tagging structure is still not as good as the folders the browser provides.

If I wanted to store common sites I’d probably have a tag called “AA-common” with all the stuff I go to frequently so it would be at the top of the list in the firefox plugin.
Svetlana Gladkova - September 08, 2008 at 04:53 am PDT

@Richard: But this is exactly what I am trying to convey - saving these links to Delicious is far from practical if you actually use them for quick access. And if you take a look at how people save Google.com on Delicious, you won’t find any AA-common tags or anything similar - it is search or google or whatever but these are the tags that reflect the content of the page, not the idea of quick access.
Richard Cunningham - September 08, 2008 at 05:09 am PDT

If you look at the people who have bookmarked google.com then a lot of them only have 10 or so bookmarks so these people look like they are trying to work out the system. My point was because it states it is a “bookmarking” site people expect something different than if it said it was a “folksonomy/metadata, link-sharing social network”. They go into expecting to use it like the bookmarks in their browser. I must note that the fact that delicious isn’t good a quick access always seems like a flaw in the design to me.

I think with lots of these sites in general there are lot of users who “bounce off”, i.e. they try a couple of things, don’t get it and leave. I know several have people they have done this with delicious, flickr and even facebook.
muddauber - September 08, 2008 at 07:25 am PDT

It may seem unusual to find people bookmarking Google, but I find
people every week that have been lost in the bowels of MSN and AOL for years. I tell them to try “Google” and they say, “What’s that?”

Yes, I live in the United States.
Ari Herzog - September 08, 2008 at 07:29 am PDT

“I don’t see why I would want to click, select, delete, type a 10 characters (google.com) and press enter instead of just clicking once (on a link).”

What do you mean by this, Richard?

Why would you go through that hassle to reach Google? If you have Internet Explorer or Firefox, all you need to do is click on the address bar that highlights whatever is there, type the letter ‘G’ and hit Enter to magically move you to Google.com.

(If you have Safari, you need to type ‘Google’ and hit enter. In other/older browsers, typing ‘Google’ and then CTRL-Enter also works.)
Richard Cunningham - September 08, 2008 at 09:09 am PDT

@Ari I think that your quicker solutions for reaching google are beyond many basic users. I think that basic users often don’t have the most optimal strategy for doing things on the web or on computers in general. I’ve seen people ignore the top right search box and I’ve seen people double click on web links even after years of use as examples.

I personally use the top right box in firefox to reach google and I never see the front page of google.com normally.

I am trying to put across what I think a quite basic user might do - I am almost certain that no user of that type will actually post a reply here - but they are most likely the ones which are bookmarking google.com.

The point is “Why Do People Bookmark Google.com?” and I suspect because most advanced users (like you, Ari) don’t do this, then the answer must be found in a different type of user.
Svetlana Gladkova - September 08, 2008 at 11:30 am PDT

@muddauber: Surprised, I thought it was nearly impossible to avoid Google - they are on TV, news, radio, billboards, are not they? How can anyone living in such a “googlified” country manage to ignore all the Google around?
iZeby - April 21, 2009 at 09:37 am PDT

Social bookmarking has become one of the major methods of free promotion for websites. We would be crazy not to take advantage of such a huge means of promotions.
iZeby - April 21, 2009 at 09:44 am PDT

I love social bookmarking, it is an awsome way to promote sites for free.
iZeby - April 21, 2009 at 12:29 pm PDT

Social bookmarking can be useful as a way to access a consolidated set of bookmarks from various computers, organize large numbers of bookmarks, and share bookmarks with contacts. Even libraries have found social bookmarking to be useful as an easy way to provide lists of informative links to patrons.
Social Bookmarking - May 05, 2009 at 09:34 pm PDT

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.
Dennis Teel - May 09, 2009 at 07:08 pm PDT

google's my home page..i don't need to bookmark it
Bookmarking - May 21, 2009 at 03:36 pm PDT

Found a new one! iZeby They have dofollow bookmarks, gotta love dofollow!
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