Australians, You Sure Do Like To Google

They say if you want to hide a dead body, ditch it in the 2nd page of Google search results. Even the word “Google” is used as a verb: To search online. When Google was on the rise, people used to post numbers all the time showing competition among search engines. It’s been a while, and Roy Morgan has some new numbers to show just how dominant Google has become in Australia.

In a four week period, almost 17 million Australians over the age of 14 used Google. That’s 86%. Almost two million visited Yahoo, and a similar number visited Bing. Part of me wonders how much of that last figure is Microsoft’s aggressive Windows 10 upgrade push alongside Cortana and Bing.

If you grab a microscope, you can make out the orange sections of the below bar graph, which represent those who use Yahoo or Bing and don’t touch Google.

According to Roy Morgan, your average Yahoo searcher spends just over seven minutes, whereas your average Binger spends 24 minutes. For Google, that figure is closer to 2.5 hours.

I had a family member over Easter tell me he occasionally swapped over to Yahoo to find what he was after. In the same week, a friend Binged right in front of me. My response to both was the same: “Wow, really? Let me know how that goes.”

There’s growing interest in other search engines from a privacy perspective, with more and more folks becoming aware of privacy as an important issue and trying out engines like DuckDuckGo. But convenience, man. It’s hard to stay away from that convenience.

All up, in 2015, Aussies spent 552 million hours on Google.

Image via Shutterstock

[Roy Morgan]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.