Statistics & Interpretations: How Using Google Search Makes You Richer or Does it?

InfoWorld published results of a survey which found Google search users were more net savvy and more likely (statistically significant) to have household income above 60, 000 USD, in comparison with competing search engines like Yahoo, MSN etc..

Unfortunately some of us tend to misinterpret results of such survey and infer erroneous causal relationships like - A way to get rich would be to use Google Search or MSN Search users are dumb (wouldn’t you love to make that inference?). Lets see why that isn’t necessarily true and also lets see if we can actually explain the results of this survey.

None of the described causal relationships follow from the stated results. Using Google search cannot miraculously increase your income by itself. Any attempt to establish a relationship is strenous at best. Also the sample size of 1000 is too small to make strong conclusions.

It is well known that Google is the leading search engine in terms of quality of results and webpages indexed. So it is natural for anyone, who is spending significant time online (which mostly leads to being net savvy), to realize that using Google search makes more sense. When all the competing products are free, why choose for second best?

Now lets think about the population who doesn’t use the best product when they know about it and it is free and they do not have any affiliation with the competing product companies. What does it say about their intelligence? Are you surprised they earn less on average?

The only thing we can reasonably infer is the established superiority of Google search over its competitors, for now.

Reference: InfoWorld article