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Searches frustrate surfers
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by Suranee | March 29, 2009 at 07:41 pm
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Hitwise found that although both US and Australian internet surfers were finding it difficult to get results when surfing the internet, " Australians were having a marginally higher success rate with their searches than their US counterparts, but the failure rate was still high."
Bill Tancer states that surfers have to use "more and more words in their search queries" since they were unable to get the search results they wanted.
He also goes on to say that "one of the problems facing search engines was the amount of content that did not have a link pointing to it- the method Google and others use to find and rank sites."
SOME of the world's most popular search engines are increasingly failing to deliver results to internet surfers as the growing number of niche websites make them harder to find, the global head of research firm Hitwise has warned.
Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise in the US -- who will be in Australia later this week to speak at the Search Marketing Expo -- said the tracking of search engines showed people were becoming increasingly frustrated with the results.
He said the failure of search engines to deliver was particularly noticeable in the US, and was reflected in the latest figures complied by Hitwise.
Australians were also becoming frustrated with search results, he said, with the once-dominant Yahoo all but abandoned as a search engine by local users, who were now using it more as a portal like Ninemsn.
"There is so much long tail (increasingly niche) content that internet users are finding it harder and harder to find," Mr Tancer told Media.
"The long tail is getting very difficult for search engine algorithms. We are seeing an increase in the number of words per query and a decrease in the success rate.
"If they return to search straight after visiting a page, then we are deeming that an unsuccessful search."
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at 22:42 on April 14th, 2009
People is part of the problem I believe. As people tries to ask more of the search engines (which according to the stats they are), they need to be more skilled in the use of search technologies.
Are they using the right operators? are they using the right search engines? do they understand basic search strategies?
Just like we don’t ask cars to drive us around automatically (not yet anyway) and we have to learn to drive, so do we all need to learn how to search as we demand more from search.