Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

You can subscribe to this site via RSS (the humanity!) or .

Longer Search Queries

Call this a followup. In February I asked if people are getting better at search: “In 2008 the average query length jumped from three to four words-per-search. Also, 25% of queries are unique to the last month (which seems like it would favor more specific searches).”

Well, looks like the trend is continuing. Hitwise reports that over 34% of search queries contain four-plus words and even better, eight-plus word queries are up 20% year-on-year (one-, two- and three-word queries all saw flat to declining growth year-on-year). Guess people are getting better at searching.

April 20, 2009