Access to information: how search engines changed the world

Chapter 2 of the SEO from zero guide. Published in October 2019 and revised in August 2026. The revision mostly affects one block: the statistics. We kept it, with an audit on top, because one of those figures was a prediction that never came true and another has been circulating for years with no source.

Before search engines, how did we find information?

We turned to books, encyclopedias, experts or libraries. That is where we researched whatever we needed and answered whatever question we had.

And if we needed to do something — buy a product, pay for a service? We went to the place where we knew it could be done. And we knew because we had heard it on the radio, seen an advert on television, or had a neighbour recommend it.

And if we needed to get somewhere? We asked the people around us which route to take, checked a map or a guidebook, or asked the bus driver whether they passed the street we wanted.

It was a basic world, where questions of information, action and movement were resolved with help from the people nearby, or from what we heard on radio, television and in the press.

Search engines radically changed all three.

The three types of search

That old split — informing, doing, moving — did not disappear: it transferred straight into the search box. Every digital strategy starts there:

1. Informational searches: someone wants to know something.
2. Transactional searches: someone wants to do something — buy, hire, book.
3. Navigational searches: someone wants to reach a specific place, physical or digital.

Our job, as the people responsible for a brand, is to make sure that when someone asks one of those questions, we can answer it better than anyone else.

Put another way: every search engine has a single function, which is to resolve a person’s search intent by listing results that are relevant to them. That sentence is the spine of this whole guide, and chapter 6 unpacks it in full.

A fourth type has been added over the years, commercial investigation — “best X”, “X vs Y”, “X reviews” — which is neither purely informational nor transactional, and which is usually the most profitable to work on.

The 2019 numbers, revisited

The original article quoted a roundup of statistics published in 2019. We are reproducing it, because it is still a good portrait of what the industry believed at the time:

• 67,000 searches are made on Google every second.
• 39% of global ecommerce comes from search.
• 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
• Around 80% of users ignore paid advertising in the results.
• By 2020, 50% of searches will be made by voice.
• 58% of searches come from a mobile device.
• 97% of first-page results include at least one image.
• 46% of Google searches are local.

Now the part we could not write in 2019: what became of them.

The voice prediction did not come true. It was quoted in every industry deck for years, and 2020 arrived with nothing resembling it. Voice search grew, settled into cars and smart speakers, and stayed there; it never replaced the keyboard.

The 93% of online experiences beginning with a search engine is the perfect example of an orphan statistic: it has been repeated for well over a decade and there is no way to trace the original study. If you cannot reach the source, do not use it to justify a budget.

The rest aged in different ways: mobile’s share kept climbing, distrust of ads held up, and local search kept gaining ground — though the routes for contacting a business from the map changed quite a bit along the way. None of those figures is the number it used to be.

The lesson is worth more than the figures: a marketing statistic with no primary source and no date is an opinion formatted as data. If you are going to base a decision on a number, check where it came from and when it was measured — and if you cannot, measure it yourself.

How did search engines change the world?

Reaching relevant information used to take time and effort, and was not available to everyone. Now anyone, anywhere, resolves a question in a couple of clicks or with their voice.

Before search engines, our job as human beings was to gather information that would let us live better. Now that information is available at any hour, the challenge is no longer access: the challenge is interpreting it and choosing the best answer among many. And the best part is that if we do not find one we like, we can write it ourselves.

Search engines shifted our brains from a passive moment of consumption to an active one of production. We stopped being consumers and became prosumers: we produce and consume information, and we create or acquire products and services that are useful to others.

It is no longer only the big companies, the ones who can afford television and radio, that capture a buyer’s attention. Any venture, however small, can solve its audience’s problem.

And for that, search is still the main place where a brand wins customers, recall and recognition — with one caveat that did not exist in 2019: more and more answers are resolved inside the search results themselves, with no visit. Showing up still counts; turning that appearance into a visit is the new work.

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