Its commonplace in today’s internet age to for people to assume that all search engines, portals and internet directories essentially all do the same thing.  While all of these services are designed to gather and present information to the end user the way the deliver results and how the get them are different.  After all, all newspapers essentially report the news, but they all report it differently.  This is why demographics are so important when considering the search engines you want to target for online advertising as the target audience can be widely diverse.

Search Engines are the most popular way of finding things on the web and on any given day over 60% of those online use a search engine to find what they are looking for. Search Engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN have strong brand visibility and loyalty but you will be surprised at how diverse the demographics are for the people using them.

So what do I mean when I refer to demographics? I’m talking about key factors like age, sex, education level, and proficiency on the web. This factors change depending on the person who uses MSN versus Yahoo versus Google, and then there are the other smaller search engines that are designed to a more targeted audience. These niche search engines drill down even further in segmenting the user demographics.

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