A set of data recently released by HitWise suggests a trend on the economic status of people using either Google or Yahoo search engines. The results revealed that those financially well-off are likely to use Google while the lower class ones gravitate to Yahoo.

Furthermore, Google users tend to be the older generation and spend more money online while Yahoo users are the younger people and ones that spend less online.

The graph below shows the age groups as surveyed by Hitwise:

Despite the fact that Google leads in online search (60+% of total searches), Yahoo is still the #1 most visited website online. Obviously, the population that goes online just don’t do search — they also do emails, groups, answers, news and the lot — which attributes to the massive traffic Yahoo is getting on that front. Google on the other hand doesn’t create its own content.

As I mentioned above, comparing Google and Yahoo from this perspective might has some inherent bias mainly because Yahoo users are more spread out because of the various services it offers while Google is only doing search (okay, maybe mail.google.com as well but those are few and far between).

In that sense, Google users should have spent much less time on the site because they’d jump off to the target websites right after viewing the search results. Maybe this is the reason why Google went out and added more links on it’s default search page to point out its other services.

In a way, the Hitwise report may be comparing a very sharp paring knife (Google) to a regular all-in-one Swiss Army knife (Yahoo).

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