We discovered the following interesting bit of research today in a BBC news article quoting Dr Jakob Nielson:

In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.

“Basically search engines rule the web,” he said.But, he added, this did not mean that the search engines were doing a perfect job.
“When you watch people search we often find that people fail and do not get the results they were looking for,” he said.
“In the long run anyone who wants to beat Google just has to make a better search,” said Dr Nielsen.

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