July 16, 2007 | Monday
Google-only searchers ‘miss out on 73% of Web’
By Jon Myers, Director Of Search in News |Search Engines |Ask |Google |Yahoo |Microsoft |Search Research
This may seem like quite a striking title and I felt it was when I read it, but when you look at the numbers you can see where the Net Imperative article was positioning its thoughts.
According to the article internet users that only use Google miss out on 72.7% of the internets best web results. The study was undertaken by researchers from Queensland University of Technology and Pennsylvania State University.
The idea of it was to look at the overlap of results on the first page of the main 4 search engines Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask. It revealed that only 0.6% of around 800,000 results were the same across the engines.
Some of the key findings include:
• Only 0.6 percent of 776,435 first-page search results were the same across the top four Web search engines implying that the top result on Yahoo! may not even appear on the first page of Google results
• Between 38 – 46 percent of all searches fail to elicit a click on a first-page search result, don’t meet users needs and drive users to try additional engines.
• Web searchers on average use three search engines a month
• Search result rankings differ significantly across major search engines; only 3.6 percent of the number-one ranked, non-sponsored search results were the same across Google, Yahoo!, MSN Windows Live and Ask
The full article is well worth a read as it opens you to ideas of life outside of Google. The perception in the UK is that Google always finds you what you are looking for when you make a search and if it does not the user reengineers their search to suit Google. It is well worth trying the same search on another search engine as they may find what you were after.
Comments
There are no comments for this entry yet. Use the form below to add yours.