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Hitwise reports that 2 word search queries remain the most popular but longer queries are gaining and one-word queries are losing ground compared to last year. 

According to an EMC study titled "As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands," released May 18, 2009, the world added 487 billion gigabytes of new data last year... that's the equivalent of 19 billion fully loaded Blu-ray discs! In another impressive feat of creating lots of new bytes, Google reports that Youtube users are responsible for adding roughly 15 hours of new video to the site every minute.

The EMC study also finds that by 2012, 850 million people will engage in online commerce, a doubling from levels in 2008. They expect internet commerce to be a $13 trillion industry by 2012.

Google's users tend to spend more money on online purchases than Yahoo's users. Is there a similar split in social networks? Seems so based on this March 2009 data from comScore Media Metrix showing the online buying power index of visitors to social networks compared to the total internet population. While Twitter's audience is still relatively small compared to Facebook and MySpace, it seems to have attracted a lot of the big spenders in the past year. 

According to comScore's February 19, 2009 report on the “State of the US Online Retail Economy," search referrals convert at over 16% compared to 4.4% for email campaigns and 0.8% for visitors coming from a comparison shopping engine.