According to AT Internet Institute, more than 20% of searches performed on Google are made via toolbars (Google Toolbar, built-in browser search bar, ...).
That is to say about 20% of Google users never see it's home page.

=== In February 2009 ===
Google: 20.1%
Live Search: 7%
Yahoo! : 2.3%

http://www.xitimonitor.com/fr-fr/barometre-des-moteurs/barometre-des-moteurs-fevrier-2009/index-1-1-6-163.html

What do you think?

(a) > more than 20% of searches performed on Google
   > are made via toolbars

(b) > That is to say about 20% of Google users never
   > see it's home page.

> What do you think?

I think (b) is not implied by (a).

I use the Firefox search bar and never see the Google homepage (other than to see if my Internet is working :P)

I expect that there's quite a few people like that out there.

Also, I assume this doesn't include searches linked to directly from other web pages. Those could easily have the toolbar-specific parameters included if a toolbar user copied and pasted the search URL and would therefore inflate stats by suggesting that user was a toolbar user.

I assume those numbers are only for France. According to the same site, Google's market share in France is... 91.27%.

The article talks about "visites provenant d’une barre de recherche directement intégrée à un navigateur" (visits from the search boxes integrated into browsers), so it probably refers to IE's search box, Firefox's search box, not to third-party add-ons like Google Toolbar.

Ionut: It's not because Google's market share in France is 91% that proportion of people using searchbars isn't the same in the rest of the world...

Tony: when you c/c a search URL, it's basically because this SERP has something special, isn't it? So in this case, you just see the SERP and don't click on any link :) But yes, I think it might trouble the stats a little bit for few websites.

Roger: you're all right, it's what I've in my French article about that btw. Anyway, I think that the percentage of people clicking on a result after having performed a search via a searchbar is about the same that the percentage of people who typed their query in the input field of Google homepage. Could I be *so* wrong?