I found this interesting snippet earlier today about the growth of longer search queries. It’s long been held in the SEO community that longer search queries were the direction search queries were going in as searchers became more sophisticated.
Longer Search Queries
Google decision to encrypt search comes as search queries are trending longer, according to Experian Hitwise. It found longer search queries, those averaging six to eight words or more, increased 3% from June 2011 to July 2011.
Also, five-word searches grew 2% month-over-month, four-word searches grew 1%, one- and three-word searches stayed flat and two-word searches declined 2%.
However, shorter search queries still accounted for a majority of the total. One-word queries were most popular, making up about 25% of the total, while two-word queries constituted another 23.5%.
I find it hard to believe that one-word queries still make up 25% of search queries and were almost equal with two word queries. I would also be most interested in finding out the percentage of all queries which were geographically oriented which would indicate the strength of local search.