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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...
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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Sometimes I feel the need to see the 1001st result, but google won't let me. :(
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.
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.
In other news, nobody likes to grovel through page after page of marginally-relevant crap.
Marginally relevant? I'll bet that for most terms you'd find just as applicable of results on the 10th page as you would on the 1st.
Not only are there loads of excellent results out there -- far more than would fit on a couple of pages -- but the ones that got on the "front page" early (possibly just by association) are perhaps unjustly boosted: People making webpages/blog entries invariably link to search results that they themselves found in the first couple of results, handing some link goodness to a result simply because it already had a good standing.
Lets rephrase this Title a bit to give a better picture of what is really being said.
Most Search Engine Users Stop after the first 60 hits
3 pages seems a lot smaller than 30 hits, but most search engines return around 20 hits per page. Another case of fun with numbers being used to dress up a non-article.
My inner self is ineffable, so don't eff with me.
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?