According to a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey, year after year, more and more people tend to use a search engine when they need information on something. The total number of Internet users conducting searches everyday got from almost 30%, as it was reported in 2002, to 49%, six years later. The survey also shows a growing interest in email services, which are, by far, people's favorite web tool, with 60% of the global online community members accessing their email accounts on a daily basis.

Besides conducting searches and checking their emails, people also show a great interest in reading news on the Internet. 39% of those who participated in the survey said that they were likely to read at least one piece of news every day. Nearly one third rely on the Internet to check the weather forecast, 29% read information related to their hobbies, while 28% surf the web for fun. 13% of the participants disclosed their interest in social networking, by saying that they usually connect to Facebook, MySpace or hi5 everyday.

Going back to searching the web, the survey shows that people with higher education and bigger revenues are more likely to conduct daily queries. 94% of those who have a broadband connection and 80% of the users with a dial-up connection said that they had used a search engine at least once. Younger respondents and men in general conduct more searches than older people and, respectively, women.

"One likely reason [for the online search growth] is that users can now expect to find a high-performing, site-specific search engine on just about every content-rich website that is worth its salt. With a growing mass of web content from blogs, news sites, image and video archives, personal websites, and more, Internet users have an option to turn not only to the major search engines, but also to search engines on individual sites, as vehicles to reach the information they are looking for." explains Senior Research Fellow Deborah Fallows.