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Most Search Engine Users Stop at Page 3
ambient12 writes "The BBC reports on a study saying that, despite the depth of content internet search providers offer, most people stop at page 3 or earlier." From the article: "It also found that a third of users linked companies in the first page of results with top brands. The study surveyed 2,369 people from a US online consumer panel. It also found 62% of those surveyed clicked on a result on the first page, up from 48% in 2002. Some 90% of consumers clicked on a link in these pages, up from 81% in 2002. "
I stopped reading this article before third sentence...
Personally, I start at the top of a set of Google results, and step through each link until I hit one that meets my needs.
In other news, nobody likes to grovel through page after page of marginally-relevant crap.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Google has spoiled us. I can remember going through pages and pages of search results. Altavista was in improvement and then Google came along.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I almost always find exactly what I'm looking for on the first page. Isn't it a good thing that search engines do a good job of giving users relevant results on the first page?
If relevant results aren't in the first 3 pages, I'm going to retry my query with different keywords, because obviously I wasn't searching for the right thing.
In my experience, most results after the first 2 or 3 pages are utterly worthless, and usually contain a bunch of foreign language mailing list posts, and repeats of earlier results mirrored on different sites.
If so, no need to read any further, folks!
Search engines are made to find what you're looking for. If you don't find it on page 1, you generally need to be more specific in your keywords. So is anyone really surprised that search engines are getting better at finding what we want, and that people are getting better at forming querries with experience?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
can have differing numbers of search results. My google prefernece is set to 50 per page. Useless study?
If it's not on the first page of Google, it doesn't exist.
If I don't find my search on the first page, I re-word my search.
If it isn't on the top first 5 hits, then I'm not going to find it any faster by scouring pages worth of info. Adding quotes or using a different phrase is my next step.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Only 10% of slashdot readers read past the third post!
I think the question is how many people actually go past the first page? Most just go with the first thing they find (unless it doesn't work or they're bored)
I won't admit I'm paranoid...or the people listening will know they've won.
I mean, honestly now, who wouldn't stop at page 3?
The depth of a search engine is *not* so that you have tons of results for a single search term, and therefore a wealth of knowledge. The depth is so that on a very specialized search, you find exactly what you need. Those results in the far-back pages are not necessary to someone who needs something from the first 3 pages, whereas they may come to be necessary later, when they come onto the first page due to being more relevent to what the searcher needs. In fact, I think the fact that people find what they need in the first couple pages is actually a testament to how good search engines are nowadays.
62% of those surveyed clicked on a result on the first page, up from 48% in 2002 Since ~80% of people use google for searching, this shows that - not only other search engines have improved, google search itself is improving quite a bit. Also, I really doubt the valuse of this study. Isnt this obvious ? Also FTFA - businesses needed to take the results of the study on board duh !!
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
I don't usually go past page 3. Not because I am lazy or have a short attention span. I just find that after 3 pages, the information is hardly relevent and I try different search terms. Although I can't say I use it to determine "top brands" as I'm usually searching for some kind of tech solution or documentation or something like that. Who Googles stuff like "shoes" or "harddrive" or something generic like that? Those kinds of searches are for specific shopping sites. And then, one is often searching for a specific price range or similar.
What's the big deal? Should people be looking past page 3?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Isn't that where the hot chick is?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Page three?, more like result 3. Think about it: if you Google and you don't see your result immediately are you going to scan _three_ pages of results or just reformulate your query?
For pure information I would agree I hardly go past the first few pages. However, if I am looking for a product then I do go past three. The reason is that there are so many filtered doorways and spam link pages or other non-relevant pages mentioning the product that they crud up the search. Even Froogle doesn't hit it right the first time all the time.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Normally after the third page the links are too irrelevant. On a side note, who here ever actually clicks googles sponsored links?
Most of the time, Google gives me the result that I need in 2 pages. Back in the day when I used Yahoo and Alta Vista, I needed to go through 10 pages to get it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Too often I jump to page four in a hurry - because the first three pages are always filled with links to shopping websites that offer no useful information.
Yes, I mean you e-bay, consumerguide, cnet, consumersearch, bizrate.....
I would pay Google to exclude these things
Three Squirrels
I stop at 1. For what I'm searching for, after the first page I'm getting foreign languages or jibberish.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Go to http://www.google.com/, type in "RadioListings", click "I'm Feeling Lucky" - and hey presto, you've found my site!
Like most people, If I do a search that doesn't give me what I want in the first few pages. I just do another search with different keywords.
I doubt that was a factor that is taken into account.
Contray to this article, I find even page one is increasingly useless and filled with marketing. Page one is often contrived and page three results start to disintegrate in relevance. Page two is often the best page. It's like a tabloid paper in ways. Page one is often a crass headline about a celeb's butt or some such. The back pages are about steroid athletes with gambling and porn club ads. A person needs to be diligent to find something relevant sandwiched away in the center somewhere.
Sometimes I feel the need to see the 1001st result, but google won't let me. :(
The only time I EVER go through more than 5 pages of a search is when I'm doing research for a paper.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
I couldn't stop laughing when I read that headline... I hadn't looked at Page3.com for a long time, but definitly a good place to stop.
(Figure it out, folks.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
making http://www.lastgoogle.com/ more useless than ever
tidokoro
what turns a man's karma neutral? lust for gold? power? or just a heart born full of neutrality?
Except the ones searching for porn on Image Search...
The vast majority of the posts agree that if the desired result isn't found in the first page, trying again with different key words is the best strategy.
So my question is, why is anyone surprised? If you want your page to rank high, try making it the most relevant one. Any other strategy is counterproductive. I wonder if some people subscribe to the payola theory of web advertising. It's like payola for music. If you pay enough, your product gets exposure and people buy it. Bad policy. When people google, they are looking for information. If you give them good information, they will hit your site. If all you have is advertising, they will leave immediately and go somewhere more satisfying.
There are people who manage to make their ads pop up on my otherwise pop-up proof browser. I'm not in the market for their product and if I were, I wouldn't buy it just out of spite.
this also supports the notion that search engines are really good at what they're doing.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I usually open any link that I find relevant in a new tab. I do this for probably about 5 results then check out the open tabs and close the garbage ones. Rinse and repeat. I'll go as many result pages necessary...
if there's only a handful of hits, I go through them all.
If there are thousands of hits I guess that the first few are bogus and skip down a few hundred
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
While this article sesm like a no brainer from the point of view of a search engine needing to return good results, and a surfers attention span, it also has a baring on business.
How important is it to be on the first page of a search result? Important enough to spend $100k a month?
>> Most Search Engine Users Stop at Page 3 ...but this one goes to eleven.
Frankly, I'm surprised any major portion of searches get past page 2 or even 1. Sure, once in a rare while I'll go to page 3, but usually if I have to go that far back, I'll just refine my search and try again. And with today's relevant searches, I usually find what I need in the first 5 results.
You've got to be kidding. So where you work:
It's fine to be reading slashdot.
It's fine to look at whatever you expected the words "hot chick" to link to.
You're going to get fired if your screen displays a wikipedia article that includes a grainy scan of a 36 year old newspaper picture, because if you look close, there's a boobie!
If your employers are truly that irrational, quit. Asking others who don't even work there to worry about such insanity is crazy.
So google is just like krispy kreme, it looks great to have all those 'o's laid out before me, but I can never get past the third one.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
Did we really need a study on this? Who knew, they could've just submitted an ask slashdot article and bought themselves a nice new computer with the money from the grant they assumably received.
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
"In other news, nobody likes to grovel through page after page of marginally-relevant crap."
Maybe that's because most of the web is hidden
This has been common knowledge amongst search engine providers for years. I remember attending a training course for Verity K2 Enterprise back in 2002 or so and being told pretty much this; the upshot of which is that if your implementation means that relvant results are languishing down on page 4 or below, you might as well give up now...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Who freaking cares?
Speaking as a Brit who's parents bought the Sun while he grew up, was every any point in going beyond page 3... You know what I'm talking about...
Just because your paranoid doesn't really mean they aren't out to get you
You're not considering people who don't click on any results at all... like, if they made a typo and followed the "did you mean..." link.
The last time I went to the third page, I was trying to figure out how much more a certain cite needed to climb to make it _into_ the results anyone might ever actually see. It was about halfway down the third page, so I figured it needed to climb another twenty spots or so to have any chance of being seen.
I don't know who was conducting this study, but from what I've seen, most users these days don't *scroll*. If it's too far down the results to be visible without scrolling, they don't see it. For that matter, a significant percentage of users never look past the first result, or perhaps the second if the first is clearly irrelevant.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
"It also found 62% of those surveyed clicked on a result on the first page, up from 48% in 2002. Some 90% of consumers clicked on a link in these pages, up from 81% in 2002."
Simply means that users now place much more trust on Google to judge the relevance of the results than they did a few years ago. Obvious...
If your google query returns more then 3 pages of hits, you don't know how to verse your question.
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
Personally, if I don't find what I was looking for on the first page, any maybe on the second, then I entered the wrong search terms. Period. I never click past page 2, and rarely past page 1. I find it a lot more efficient to refine my search based on the unwanted results I get the first time than to plow through endless pages of irrelevant results.
I'm clearly superior because I go to 11.
11, 11, 11.
Is this article about GOOGLE, or The Sun?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
I hope advertisers don't get ahold of this research. If they find out that being near the front of search results is important, they might start playing dirty tricks to get to the front! The entire Web could be reduced to a mush of keyword spamming and link farms, making it difficult to find solid information! Whew, I sure hope that doesn't happen, it would be awful.
Since Google has become so popular over the last seven years or so since I first started using it, and advertisers have started abusing PageRank, I'm finding more often I have to go past the first three pages to find the results I'm looking for when it is a search for a popular topic.
Looking for reviews about a product? The first page is always nothing more than sites linking to other sites for reviews (many of which are the same review or marketing materials posted on several differnt places).
Plus, when I first started using Google there were no sponsored results to scroll past. I've been unsucesful in blocking those results 100% of the time with Adblock so far.
In short, Google is actually less usefull to me now than they used to be as a search engine. But Google Earth and some of the other functions are adding value to them, especially when I can tie a google search result into another area (like Google Maps).
Sheesh! and i keep wondering why the price of my TV licence keeps going up.
It has a lot to do with what I'm searching for though. For instance, if I'm screwing off by typing a (not famous) person's name / handle into Google, I'll go far deeper because the pages at the front will just be the site that the person visits which also happen to be popular on a wide scale. Often the juicier bits are in the 'fringe' sites that won't see the first page of Google results. Also, some search topics will repeatedly bring up an item you don't want, no matter how you phrase it or pick keywords (or use NOT flags etc.), so you have to dig deep. Still, I can't say I find the results surprising...after all, I set Google to display 100 results per page, so when I look at page 2 it's what most folks would see on page 20. ;)
Unpleasantries.
There are some seriously self-conscious people out there in the music world. And yeah most of them are self-searchers, based on when I've baited and panned bands and gotten direct reactions from them.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Similar to the post above this, I do a quick search and if I don't see the results I'm looking for I reformulate the query. If the first page doesn't have what you are looking for, and lower ranked pages are supposedly less useful, your problem is likely the query, not the results.
After serveral iterations of re-doing the query I'll then go deeper and deeper in the pages on the chance that what I'm looking for it more is more esoteric than what the top ranked pages contain.
Also like the previous post I'll often hop off to Wikipedia. Since often a Wikipedia link is included in the original search results I don't really expect to find the answer there, but it might have additional information to help me refine my search.
I thought the linked article was lacking in that it didn't seem to reference re-searching. It might just as well be true that people will reformat their queries until the results they want are in the first three pages. Why read 10 pages of summaries if adding an additional search term will bring a link from page 10 to page 1?
Three ORDINARY women, one physical, one brainy and one mystic
Dawn,Briney and Selene (you get the idea)
Ride motorcycles, use femminist retoric to solve crimes a few car cases, i.e. LOST but set in downtown Springfield
Wonder if anyone else has done this...Google
52 FIFTY TWO pages of link-pron farms becuase it contains the word LESBIAN
And people TO THIS VERY DAY deny my Gay=Sexual selection idea
They call it evil, look away and never study SHIT
L E S B I A N S Q U A D G O !!!!
(thingy word, to type in and prove I aint REAL = = DUMBEST
Obviously, people stop at Page 3 once they realize there isn't going to be a Page 3 Girl.
Since I've got my setup to show 50 results per page, I do get tired of searching after three pages.
Is that a self-regulating thing? Power serachers will get a lot of search results per page and go through three pages. Less discriminating people doing a search will be satisfied with Google's default of 10 results per page and go through three pages too.
So, what is the number of search results people stop at? Is it all over the map depending on how many results per page people have, or is it 30?
There's a third page?
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
In other news, 99% of studies don't mention what kind of people were questioned.
'cause it's on the second page! And no one reads all the way to the second page!
Uh... well, maybe I missed something in the original article...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
Most users stop looking when they find what they're looking for! God save those pour souls who don't!
I've gotten to where I automatically click on page 5 or so for a lot of searches to get past all the spammy garbage.
I stop at page 3 every day -- http://page3.com/
I stop when "I'm feeling lucky".
Seems google users and readers of The Sun have a lot in common. The analogy goes a bit deeper if you're googling for smut.
The article doesn't seem to go into too much detail about the methodology and the survey questions, and what their sample group was. And, of course, most importantly, what they were searching for.
Most of the time, most of what you are going to be looking for is going to come up on the first few pages. And it is all going to be the same information, repeated on different sites. For example, say I am looking for the address of a local cafe called "Hipster Dudes Coffee", I am probably going to find its address repeated several time on the first page of results.
On the other hand, say I want to research the different ethnic groups that live on the East Coast of Taiwan. I am not looking for a simple piece of information here, and might have to look several pages in before I find something that is directly addressing what I am looking for.
So, I think this survey seems to be somewhat obvious, but incomplete.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I worked at a search engine for a little while, and I tried to point out that you should give people more with their search. Even if you're not doing an image search, you could have pictures of adorable puppies or bikini girls on each search page. Give users a reason to see what's on the next page. They didn't listen, obviously. Maybe I'll start my own search engine. Everything after the third page will be treasure maps to free money. Show those lasy bums!
He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.
Perhaps the average user is getting better at optimizing their searching? To be honest I usually click on one of the first three results if I am am looking for a single source of high-level information. Exactly what I am looking for tends to pop up right away because of the keywords I use.
Many of us are painfully aware of the poor choice or search terms some of our friends/family use. Perhaps people are wising up, and this study actually shows promise for increased search efficiency.
As for changing the search term... If I can see clearly that what I typed is returning a large number of unwanted results I will often append to remove a popular eroneous subject or narrow my search. That does not seem a falacy, but this study makes it sound like changing search terms is.
With Google set to display 50 results per page I rarely need to get beyond page 3 :)
Actually, no. If until the page 3 you didn't find what you wanted, you likely have an idea what's wrong with your search terms and add some -sex -buy -ass or such to your search terms, culling 95% of spam that appeared in the first 3 pages, and getting THE result within 3 pages away. This means I get the site that was, say, on page 70, but not by skipping 70 pages but by narrowing search terms and pulling it up.
I -did- search 200+ pages sometimes. Like for classical music mp3 - one that IS in public domain, but still getting the actual mp3 is hard, as the search is spammed ears deep with sites that provide you with thousands of free classical mp3 as long as you pay $99/month for access.
Besides, does the results of the research mean things about the users, or maybe just about the quality of search engines improving? If I look for an "undocummented" javascript method reference, I don't care there's 50 sites explaining it, I need one - any of them, and likely will pick the one that is on the first page. The fact that your search resulter 3,000,000 results doesn't mean it was useless, it just means the term is popular - still quite likely the site you want is within first 3 of the 3,000,000.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Umm, what search engine? What are the details. Frankly google is probably higher in the first page hits, but is unlikely to be the target audience for this article. Seems to create an atmosphere, yes I know it says it as well, of opinion that you have to have your website on the front page.
Who benefits?
Google? nope they try to actually give search results. Who else? Well I don't use them, but in the old days some search engines used to sell placements. I assume it's either them or businesses who sell search engine positioning services.
I also stopped reading fairly early.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Hopefully this means that search engines are getting better, but it could mean people give up faster. Sometimes I am searching for something and despite changing my search queries several times I still get stuck with tons of pages that have nothing but some text and adsense links. Before this, it was probably easier for google to try and control people who tried to manipulate search results, but now I think they are less likely when so many of these sites are actually generating revenue for google.
*ahem*
... I get 100 results per page.
... if you replace "search engine" with "the sun"
What page 3? Theres more than one page? Perhaps Google should come out with a Page One only search and forget about the rest. They can call it Google-One.
The statistic might be true for all internet users, but fast-moving business execs have no time for three pages. They expect their desired result to show up at the top of the first page, before they finish typing in their query. If the answer can be e-mailed to them before they even think to run a search, even better.
Since I started using Google, I just always click on I'm Feeling Lucky . After all who am I to second-guess the Great and All-knowing Google.
The default page size at Google.com is 10... I have mine set to 50, for the very reason that I hate paging. I still go through about 3 pages... but 3 of my pages is 5 times the number of results of a 10 result page.
Doesn't this just mean that the search engines are doing their job well? I mean, when I use a search engine, it's because I'm searching for something specific, and I usually find what I'm looking for in the first 30 links (I use Google at the default setting of 10 links per page). If I don't find one valid candidate in the first two pages, I try a different search.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
well, I always jump straight to page 7 since that's a lucky number
I usually stop there too; www.page3.com
What it is is a product of the fact that search engines are actually useful now. I remember in Altavista you used to have to wade knee deep in sewage through all the pages before you found something relevant to what you searched for. Because of the way the engine functioned, the first results were usually the least relevant. Nowadays search engines like Google usually nail it outright, making even the "I'm feeling lucky" button work a majority of the time. I see this as an absolutely positive thing, and I wouldn't have needed an investigation to figure this out either.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Or at least, that's what my company's web filter says. Grrr....
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").