Do you search in quotes with keyword tools?

People's search mechanisms vary widely.

From what I've seen, most technical people (and, to some extent, this includes marketers) dramatically overestimate the Internet skills of people. This includes searching it.

So those skills that we have, even down to the level of refining a search by putting in extra keywords, aren't that widely used. Things like searching within sites and using the Google cache are not very well understood.

There's a load of research in the academic literature about this. Somewhere like useit.com would be a good place to start.

From a purely personal viewpoint, I do many of my searches in Firefox, which has a great feature where you can highlight a term in the text and choose 'Search Google' from the menu. That does a search without quotes.

If I'm typing multiple words directly into a search box I'll nearly always use quotation marks. If that search method doesn't work I'll use more sophisticated methods.

So what's the moral of the story?
- for inexperienced Internet users you need to rank well for searches without quotes.
- if you're target market is experienced Internet users, then ranking well for quoted terms is very powerful (however that market is smaller than you might think, and there's no guarantee that this user group see a need to pay for information).