GVU's Seventh WWW User Survey Use Graphs

How Users Find out About WWW Pages

Notes:

For this question, users were allowed to mark more than one answer. The primary method people find out about other sites is via search engines (86.34% Seventh vs. 87.71% Sixth) and other Web pages (84.63% vs. 86.92% Sixth). This continues the reversal from the Fifth Survey, where 90.7% reported finding out about Web pages from other Web pages and 83.1% from search engines. Printed media (62.47% Seventh vs. 67.95% Sixth), friends (56.92% Seventh vs. 56.66% Sixth), TV (30.20% Seventh vs. 35.54% Sixth), email signatures (31.23% Seventh vs. 30.01% Sixth), and Usenet Newsgroups (32.75% Seventh vs. 34.25% Sixth) remain other popular methods for finding out about other pages. The use of Usenet has declined 12 percentage points from the Fifth Survey (44.4%). As with the Sixth Survey, the younger generation is more likely to find out about other pages from friends, while the older generation make more use of printed media.

Table of Data for All Categories

How Users Find out About WWW Pages	All	Male	Female	USA	Europe	19-25	26-50	50+
Books	4458.00 27.34%	2960.00 27.04%	1437.00 28.04%	3576.00 27.76%	216.00 20.11%	707.00 23.75%	2731.00 28.03%	596.00 28.60%
Friends	9280.00 56.92%	6105.00 55.77%	3037.00 59.26%	7503.00 58.24%	525.00 48.88%	1900.00 63.82%	5411.00 55.54%	1017.00 48.80%
Other	4354.00 26.71%	2998.00 27.39%	1281.00 25.00%	3577.00 27.76%	248.00 23.09%	725.00 24.35%	2620.00 26.89%	525.00 25.19%
Printed Mdeia	10185.00 62.47%	6815.00 62.26%	3234.00 63.10%	8094.00 62.82%	656.00 61.08%	1622.00 54.48%	6210.00 63.74%	1488.00 71.40%
Search Engines	14076.00 86.34%	9610.00 87.79%	4280.00 83.51%	11147.00 86.52%	934.00 86.96%	2608.00 87.60%	8522.00 87.48%	1683.00 80.76%
Sigs	5091.00 31.23%	3523.00 32.19%	1506.00 29.39%	4071.00 31.60%	318.00 29.61%	944.00 31.71%	3071.00 31.52%	564.00 27.06%
TV	4924.00 30.20%	3166.00 28.92%	1697.00 33.11%	4115.00 31.94%	192.00 17.88%	867.00 29.12%	2918.00 29.95%	639.00 30.66%
Usenet	5339.00 32.75%	4245.00 38.78%	1019.00 19.88%	4156.00 32.26%	446.00 41.53%	933.00 31.34%	3442.00 35.33%	533.00 25.58%
WWW Pages	13798.00 84.63%	9341.00 85.34%	4275.00 83.41%	10984.00 85.25%	876.00 81.56%	2510.00 84.31%	8350.00 85.71%	1718.00 82.44%

For more information or to submit comments:
send e-mail to www-survey@cc.gatech.edu.
GVU's WWW Surveying Team
Graphics, Visualization, & Usability Center
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280