What would we do without search engines? Seriously, just imagine life without Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others… How could we begin to make sense of the billions of pages that are indexed on the web?

Each day around the globe, hundreds of millions of searches are carried out and 80% of internet sessions begin with an online search – but how meaningful are the search results given? You can be sure that the internet 'heavyweights' will be featured – but will these pages and pages of search results tell you which is the best website for what you’re looking for, as rated for by real people? That’ll be a no, then!

Unless you’re using Finday, that is. Finday is a social search engine and we’re passionate about making our users’ search experience a nicer and more meaningful experience.

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After fulfilling our entertainment needs online (listening to music, streaming TV series or downloading movies), the second thing we most like to do on the internet is shop. And according to official stats, we do it in huge numbers…

A report published by Nielsen on global online shopping trends revealed that more than 875 million consumers have shopped online at some time or another, and the number of internet shoppers rises steadily year on year.

Who are the biggest online shoppers?

1) South Korea
2) UK
3) Germany
4) Japan
5) USA

What are people shopping for? The most popular items bought are:

1) Books
2) Clothing (including accessories and shoes)
3) Videos, DVDs and games
4) Airline tickets
5) Electronic goods

So, the number of e-commerce sites on the web is staggering – but how to get the best out of online shopping?

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For the past few months, the search engine waters have increased their activity and things have reached a boiling point.  Microsoft and Yahoo! teamed up to overthrow Google, the reigning King, by renaming the old Live Search, now known as "Bing". Google included some improvements on its end, by trying out a test version of its own engine called Caffeine, and added some new features to its classic interface. But in the end, as 2009 was leaving us, the fact of the matter is that this year the question remains the same: which of the two is the best?

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There's no doubt that everything that's "social" is hip on the Internet. At least that's what the Google Zeitgeist 2009 study has shown.  This study captures the fastest rising (or falling) queries for each quarter of the year, queries which show the most popular searches on Google in the U.S. in 2009.

According to this data, Twitter and Michael Jackson were the leading searches on Google, holding the top two positions in the Fastest Rising category, coming closely behind in third, was of course, Facebook. The second quarter of 2009 had a sharp peak with the breakout of swine flu cases, making swine flu the most searched query in the Google News ranking. The rest of the queries in this category are mostly comprised of references to reality television, something that has inevitably become an integral part of television and American culture. Searches of singing sensations like Britain's Got Talent's Susan Boyle or American Idol's Adam Lambert, in second and fourth place respectively, show that Americans still can't get enough of these so-called "rise to fame" stories that come from reality talent searches.

With data like this, obviously our interest isn't so much on knowing what words are the most searched ones, but to analyze why they are the most popular. It's striking to know that, at a point in time where browsers themselves self-complete the URLs typed in, taking user navigation history and the integration of practical functions such as bookmarks into account, people readily continue to use Google to target sites which they probably visit on a day-to-day basis, like Facebook.

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The Internet is the Internet, a place with so much going on in and around it like new start up companies, updates, applications, websites, sharing sites and ever so popular social networks, whether an online newbie or an avid surfer, it can tend to feel like you're logging onto the "Wild Wild West" than onto your PC. Inevitably, those three W's we type in can make our options seem so vast that it makes the not-so-internet or tech savvy, shy or inhibited at trying new things for fear that it might take us to places unknown or unsafe.

Our web surfing has become such a normal, day to day activity that we have inherently developed techniques like keyword searches, that have optimized the way we surf the net, although most of those techniques are self-taught along the way. Case in point, being monogamous to specific search engines and web pages we know and recognize is common but unrealistic; because unlike real life, in virtual life there really is always something bigger and better out there, it's just a matter of going outside the box and trying it out for yourself.

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