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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.
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 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.
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?