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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.
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.
Welcome to Slashdot!
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.
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?