Hitwise claims gender and age differences with search engine users

IT Facts at ZDnet raises the profile of a MediaPost article revealing differences in gender and age between search engine users.

Annoyingly, MediaPost looks as if it runs a system where a paid subscription is required to access articles once archived - but it does highlight information that wasn’t published on the SearchEngineWatch analysis of the July 2005 Hitwise figures, so I’ll highlight some of the more unique points here:

Google users
- 53.6 percent male
- most visitors with household incomes greater than $100,000

Yahoo! users
- 50.2 percent female
- higher proportion of searchers between the ages of 18 and 34

MSN users
- 53.7 percent female
- highest proportion of users older than 55

Ask users
- 58.7 percent female
- most users between ages of 18 and 24 and 35 and 54 years old

ALSO: 87 percent of searches at Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, are for 1 or 2 words - while it is 69% at Ask.

ADDITIONALLY:

After searching, the search engines directed users to the following theme areas:

Shopping and Classifieds
Ask Jeeves 15.05 percent
Yahoo! Search: 11.24 percent
Google 10.68 percent
MSN Search 10.65 percent

Entertainment
Yahoo! Search: 9.81 percent
Google 9.58 percent
MSN Search 8.97 percent
Ask Jeeves 8.55 percent

Business & Finance
Ask Jeeves 8.55 percent
MSN Search 8.10 percent
Yahoo! Search: 7.10 percent
Google 6.54 percent