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. "

It makes sense

I stopped reading this article before third sentence...

Re:Well, duh.

> In other news, nobody likes to grovel through page after page of marginally-relevant crap.

Welcome to Slashdot!

Re:Well, duh.

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.

It wasn't always that way

Google has spoiled us. I can remember going through pages and pages of search results. Altavista was in improvement and then Google came along.

Reformulate query, search again..

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?

Is that expected?

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?

Duh

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.

This is news?

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?

A page

can have differing numbers of search results. My google prefernece is set to 50 per page. Useless study?

What I do

If it's not on the first page of Google, it doesn't exist.

Stop at page 3?

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.

That's not what depth is for

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.

Makes sense

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

Well, yeah

Isn't that where the hot chick is [wikipedia.org]?

Bull.

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.

Where this doesn't necessarily work

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.

I always stop at Page3

I couldn't stop laughing when I read that headline... I hadn't looked at Page3.com [page3.com] for a long time, but definitly a good place to stop.