The number of people who use internet search engines to find information has jumped over the last year, claiming a solid No. 2 spot behind e-mail among online tasks, a new study finds.
Of the 94 million American adults who went online on a given autumn day this year, 63 percent used a search engine, compared with 56 percent in June 2004, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said Sunday.
Until recently, search and news have been running neck-and-neck for the No. 2 spot among internet tasks, said Lee Rainie, the project's director. But search had a dramatic jump over the past year to widen the gap over news, used by 46 percent of the internet's daily population.
Use of search engines was higher among users who are richer and better educated, as well as those with high-speed broadband connections that are continuously on.
"If you're cooking dinner and wondering what ingredients to put in your meal, if you had a dial-up connection you would probably go to your cookbook," Rainie said. "If ... you have a broadband connection, you'd likely go to your bookmarks" for your favorite search engine.
E-mail remains the most popular application, used by 77 percent of the daily sampled population.
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TiVo for all: TiVo is expanding its video recording service so users will be able to transfer recorded television shows onto Apple's iPods or Sony's PlayStation Portable -- the latest move aimed at putting TV in people's hands for viewing anywhere.
The enhanced TiVoToGo feature being announced Monday will also add more copy-protection measures to discourage possible copyright abuse that would anger Hollywood.
With its introduction in January of TiVoToGo, the digital video recording pioneer gave its broadband Series2 subscribers the ability to transfer recorded shows to Windows-based PCs and laptops as well as portable media players. But the service was available only to devices compatible with Microsoft's Portable Media Center platform.
Now, by adding support for the MPEG-4 video format, TiVo hopes to capitalize on the popularity of iPods and PSPs, which are among today's hottest handheld gadgets with video capabilities.
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__The next household word:__Skype, the internet-calling phenomenon that eBay acquired for $4.1 billion, is breaking into the U.S. consumer mainstream by selling its telephone kits in RadioShack stores.
Skype Technologies, which counts 66 million users of its free- and low-cost web-based telephone services, mainly in Europe and Asia, said on Sunday that it will distribute Skype phone gear through 3,500 RadioShack stores in the United States.
The move into retail promises to raise Skype's profile with U.S. broadband users who have begun using alternatives to traditional phone systems that rely on Internet connections on computers or phones from Vonage, SunRocket and others.
Skype, which has signed up 20 to 30 times more users than other broadband phone alternatives, offers simple-to-install software to allow users to call other computers or phones. It works like a music file-sharing service and needs no central phone network switches as Vonage does, making it cheaper to operate.
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AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
