Digital Marketing

For billions of people around the world, the Internet has become an essential component of their everyday social and business lives. And though they seldom give it a moment’s thought, the search engines that help them navigate through the plethora of pages, images, video clips, and audio recordings found on the World Wide Web have also become essential. Search technology—shortened simply to “search” in the IT world and referred to as such in the rest of this report—is only two decades old, but it is a cornerstone of the Internet economy.1

The numbers prove its utility. In 2010, an average Internet user in the United States performed some 1,500 searches, while some 1.6 trillion searches a year are conducted globally.2

Few attempts have been made to assess the value of all this activity. Various reports point to the large amount of money advertisers spend to appear prominently on search pages as an indication of its worth. The profits of those that provide search services—portals, search engines, and search platforms—are another indication. Yet no study has comprehensively assessed the benefits and value of search. This report aims to rectify that, showing how search creates value and who benefits. Where possible, it quantifies the value created. Among our key findings:

ƒƒMost work to date has identified three sources of search value: time saved, price transparency, and the raised awareness harnessed by advertisers. Though these are important, they only partially capture the ways in which search creates value, and so underestimate its worth considerably. We identified six more sources of value, and there will undoubtedly be others as search continues to evolve.

ƒƒA conservative estimate of the global gross value created by search was $780 billion in 2009. Across the five countries studied, only 4 percent of the gross value created by search was captured by the search industry.

ƒƒWorldwide, some 65 percent of search value flowed directly through to GDP in 2009,...