The use of Google (and other standard web-search engines) is not the only means of finding information online.
There are two other main ones, that in addition, helps to limit Google’s ability to track your activities. One is to navigate to the webpages you are interested in by typing their URL (i.e. the web address) in the browser bar, the second is to follow recommended or/and previously saved links (called, favorites or bookmarks).
Andrei Z. Broder in his 2002 taxonomy of web search, calls this, navigational search,which he presents as “give me the URL of the site I want to reach”. Directly reaching a specific website is like going straight to the book we need in a library rather than first asking the librarian or using the catalog. According to Daniel M. Russel 2019, “a large fraction of queries are searches for another website […] which make up as much as 25% of all queries”.
- Navigational, i.e. “go”
- Informational, i.e. “know” (search engines)
- Transactional, i.e. “do” (purchase
Besides the navigational queries, Broder mentions the informational ones whose purpose “is to find information assumed to be available on the web”. Russel sees these as being about 40%. Broder finally mentions the transactional ones (usually involving a purchase). Those amount to 35% of the queries. The figures refer to the period of 2018-19. During the period of 2020-22, with the covid-19 pandemic and confinement, transactional queries may have increased significantly.
Broder’s three-fold distinction (2004) and Russell’s (2019) statistics remind us that search engines are not the only way to reach online information. Interestingly, Google used the same framework, adding a fourth dimension to the ways one can reach online information :
4. Informational (basic), i.e. “know simple” (search engine, basic searches).
According to Tom Anthony (2016), the new “know simple” category corresponds to quick informational queries that can be answered with a short message (< 2 sentences). It usually consists of agreed-upon and non-controversial issues: the time the sun rises on a specific day at a specific place, the number of kilometers between two towns, the chemical property of an element, the present capital of a country, etc. These straightforward queries are especially frequent on mobile devices. Mobile searches already overpassed desktop’s in the last quarter of 2016 (according to gs.statcounter.com).
