I’ve posited this in the past, now Compete shows data that backs it (in as much as you buy Compete data):
What you find is that the top 1% of searchers performs a full 13% of all searches in a given month. If you extend this to the top 20% the number of queries increase to roughly 70%. So in contrast to the standard 80-20 pareto it appears that in web search there is roughly a 70-20 distribution. So what if we break this out by engine?
I (and I bet you) count myself in the category of power searcher – probably 25-50 searches a day. My mother, well, more like 1-5 a day. If that.
What I do wonder is whether Google et al are creating products for ME, or for my mother. This data would argue that they should be for me.