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70% Of Searchers Experience Search Fatigue 
By: Jordan McCollum 2007-10-24 A Kelton Research study, commissioned by Autobytel, reports that 72.3% of US adult searchers experience search engine fatigue (either always, usually, or sometimes) when researching a topic on the Internet. What should this statistic tell us?
While I was leaning toward D, Greg Sterling on Search Engine Land highlighted some of the other findings from the study:
Is it search engines or searchers faults that the vast majority of searchers 1.) spend hours looking for information online, 2.) develop fatigue and 3.) give up and walk away from the computer? And then we see the ultimate frustrations that these searchers experienced. The #1 complaint mentioned by searchers was:
Each of these complaints could be blamed on either the search engine or the searchers themselves. Too many results? Is the search engine overwhelming users or are the searchers entering too generic of terms and unwilling to deal with the consequences? Ultimately, however, I think the root cause of all of this"the complaints, the frustrations and the fatigue"is our expectations of search engines. We type in something and expect the search engine to understand perfectly"we dont want too many results, too few results, or that are too random. The search engine doesnt understand -paza hotle- (a search I actually performed earlier this month, sadly)? AUGH. Actually, to further complicate things, Google, Yahoo and MSN do understand -paza hotle-"and some of them even automatically include results for my spell checked query. I dont have to make any effort to make my queries coherent"the search engine does all the thinking for me. Why cant it just pick the right result or figure out exactly what I mean by -oneida- or -apple-? Search engines are working on it, but theyre not there yet. And apparently they have a long way to go if users still have to spend hours looking for things. What do you think? Is it search engines fault or searchers fault? Comments Tag: Search Engine, SEO Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Reddit |  Furl Have a bookmark! -  About the Author: Jordan McCollum is a staff writer for the popular marketing blog Marketing Pilgrim. She has worked in search engine optimization with clients including 3M, Little Giant Ladders and ADP. After graduating from Brigham Young University, Jordan joined the SEO copywriting team at the Internet marketing firm 10x Marketing. After 10x closed its doors in December 2006, Jordan became a freelance writer and Internet marketing consultant specializing in SEO. She also has extensive experience with web analytics, conversion rate enhancement and e-mail marketing. |
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