while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the “long tail” – queries asked a little over once a day.
My aha moment in the article occurred while reading the following paragraph:
The market doesn’t like a vacuum and people do solve their software needs in the long tail. They do it using two basic tools: Microsoft Excel and email. I’ve seen so many business that run on Excel+email. People build structured lists in Excel and then send them out over email for comments and updates – a list of people to hire, a list of deals they want to do with action items included, a list of features for the next product.
While normal users don’t think of it this way, what they’re really building is an long-tail application – a custom application, built by the end user and networked over email.
The article is a must read!
