What is the Most Searched Color Online?

Picitup has developed over the last couple of years a powerful image search engine that extends the offerings of current image search sites.  During the past 6 months, Picitup has been operating an image search engine in which users perform image search over a variety of search engines such as Yahoo, Picasa and Flickr as shown in Figure 1.

 

Figure 1- Basic image search for a flower

After each initial search, users were further allowed to filter images of a specific color out of over a dozen choices as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2- Picitup Color Picker

Choosing a specific color would pass through only images of specific color. For example picking the yellow color for the search shown in Figure 1 would filter in only yellow flowers as shown in Figure 3.

  Figure 3- Only Yellow flowers are shown

Millions of searches were performed and Picitup has decided to release today its “clicked colors” distribution. The relative clicks were calculated using :

The results Figure 4 below, show the relative number of clicks each of the colors has received:

Figure 4- Relative frequency of each color in relation to average

One can observe the surprisingly brown was quite popular amongst the choices, is there an explanation? Well, further analysis has combined the blues, the greens the reds and the grays each into a group as shown in Figure 5.

 Figure 5- Clicks of Color groups

One can see that as might be expected, the blue and the red groups are notably strong, while brown remains dominant in the third place.

Summary

Blue and red are the most clicked colors, while brown and green should be noted as the most clicked color on its own. This distribution might apply for the colors you choose for you web page or Icons. Further data we are currently collecting might apply as well to colors consumer goods manufacturers should choose for their products.

Comments

[liam]

I think brown is quite popular in design, especially the web recently: For example take a look at this inspirational post: http://www.designshard.com/inspiration/get-web-design-ideas-inspiration-from-other-designs-brown/ As you can see there's a lot of beautiful brown websites. Maybe this has something to do with it's popularity

[alon atsmon]

Good Angle Liam!

[Max]

maybe in this instance that users are just clicking the colours that appear first in the pallet ie : black and brown to test the application. (just a possibility)

Liam beat me to my own article on brown web inspiration

[alon atsmon]

@max, nice thought, though actual product color distribution we will post later on will show similar findings..