People are searching less, and other things you didn’t know about the internet

The day after President Barack Obama gave the State of the Union, ComScore, a digital analytics firm, released what might be called a “State of the American Internet” report. Here are some of its more surprising findings:

• The search market is showing signs of maturity, as core content searches declined for the first time in history, falling 3% last year. Even though more people are using search functions—4% more than in 2011—they are making 7% fewer searches per person. One reason for this, says ComScore, is that people are increasingly heading to specific locations to conduct searches—sites like Amazon $AMZN, eBay or Facebook $META, or Whitepages.com. Of all leading search engines, Microsoft $MSFT’s Bing was the only whose per-person search volume actually increased. But Google $GOOGL still dominates: It’s responsible for two-thirds of all web searches.

• Only three social networks gained more unique visitors in 2012 than Twitter $TWTR or LinkedIn. And they all focused on visual content:

• While e-commerce spending rose 13%, digital content and subscriptions grew the most. Purchases of things like Amazon movie downloads and Netflix $NFLX or Spotify $SPOT subscriptions were the fastest-growing e-commerce product category, at 26%.
• But mobile-based e-commerce—”m-commerce”?—is stealing increasingly bigger slices of the pie. Mobile e-commerce now accounts for 11% of all online commerce. A chunk of that is due to the increase of “showrooming,” where in-store shoppers use mobile devices to compare brick-and-mortar prices with online options, often purchasing the product online.