Recently, I wrote about why I wanted Google to keep the overall number of sources down to a small number and this morning I saw the following article from Clickz that customers preferred aggregated results over individual merchant sites. This reminded me immediately of why I regularly use Google News: time.

People want to save time. Google News saves me time tracking the news.

Apparently these shopping aggregation services — which I’ve never really used that much myself — really help online shoppers decide where the best deal is at. More power to ‘em!

This represents a 13 percent rise since late 2002, when approximately 46 percent of online shoppers reportedly went to aggregator sites, and the majority (54 percent) went straight to merchant sites.

With RSS growing in popularity we’re definitely starting to see a growing trend towards certain types of content being less important in the browser. For businesses online, especially, now is the time more than ever to make sure that at least some of your content is being aggregated, otherwise it could be a real missed opportunity.