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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Long tail evolution

December 17, 2007

I recently gave a presentation on the evolution of the long tail, concluding that the long tail is getting longer, but the ‘head’ is getting bigger. The reasons for the increasing length of the long tail are clear: there are more people online, they are spending more time online, and their search habits are becoming more sophisticated. This means that there are more things being searched for and more ways of searching for them, hence the number of distinct but niche search terms – the long tail – is increasing.

The reasons behind the growing ‘head’ are little more complex – the initial assumption may well be that if there are more searches, there will be proportionately less searches for the most popular terms. However, this isn’t the case. As the graph below illustrates, over the last two years there has been a consolidation of the most popular terms. For example, for the 4 weeks ending in the middle of October 2005, 5% of all search volume consisted of 49 terms, but for the same period this year (2007), that number deceased to just 9 terms. Decreases are also seen when we look at the number of terms required to make up 10% and 20% of search volume, although the scale of the change decreases the deeper we get into the tail.

So why the change? The answer is simple: navigational search – i.e. people typing the name of a site into a search engine rather than directly entering or bookmarking the URL. Navigational search has increased for a number of reasons, particularly search boxes in browser toolbars, ‘I Feel Lucky’-type buttons, and increased levels of user trust in search engines. There has been a 30% increase in navigational search in the UK over the last two years, and over 70% of the top 2000 search terms are now navigational in nature.

This trend towards navigational search highlights the importance of having a strong brand online. However, I was asked interesting question at the conference: is the head only getting bigger because of the growth of navigational search? In other words, is the consolidation in popular terms simply a case of more people searching for ‘bebo’, ‘ebay’, etc., or is there also a consolidation of non navigational terms such as ‘games’ and ‘weather’? As the chart below illustrates, there has certainly been a consolidation of the most popular navigational terms over the last three years.

On the other hand, when you look at the non-navigational terms it’s a completely different story. The number of terms required to make up 1%, 2%, 3%, 4% and 5% of search volume have all increased rather than decreased. Therefore, there has been a consolidation of navigational terms, but the opposite has been true of non-navigational terms. In other words, the head is getting bigger because of the growth in navigational search, while the tail is getting longer because people are using a wider and more complex variety of non-navigational search terms.

Posted by Robin Goad at 09:30 AM | (4) | (2)
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