Six months after the launch of WauSearch, the experimental search engine, an alternative to Google designed by and for information professionals, is once again being discussed. CLIP, the well-known newsletter of the Spanish Society for Scientific Documentation and Information (SEDIC), publishes on its website Is There Life Beyond Google? Designing WauSearch.
After months of online operation, WauSearch continues to function stably and without interruptions, responding to more than 26,000 search queries, as I just verified in today’s statistics for Friday, June 12, 2015. Regarding statistics, I will reveal that the countries using the search engine most frequently, in order of request volume, are Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. As an interesting detail, I can confirm that 75.4% of queries are resolved immediately within the first 30 seconds of searching. However, and here lies the curious finding, 11.7% of users resolve their queries within a 15-minute window, and finally 11.1% of users perform searches that can last more than one hour. In these cases, the use of the search engine’s result export function is confirmed.
In summary, WauSearch is beginning to generate a loyal user base that is gradually growing and that anticipates, at any moment, a significant update to their preferred search tool.