Google Gullibility
Users live by search, but they also die by search.
People turn to search as their first step — or as their second step, if their first attempt at navigating fails. Users typically formulate good initial queries, and vaguely understand how to tickle the search engine into coughing up desired sites when they appropriately modify their main keywords. For example, in our new study, a user looking for a modest gift for a football fan searched for “football trinket.” Five years ago, such a user would most likely have searched “football” and been buried by the results.
Still, today’s users rarely change their search strategy when the initial query fails. They might modify their first attempt, but they typically stick with the same general approach rather than trying something genuinely new.
For example, one user tested the Mayo Clinic’s site to find out how to ensure that a child with a milk allergy would receive sufficient calcium. The user attempted multiple queries with the keyword “calcium,” but never tried the words “milk” or “allergy.”
Also, users are incredibly bad at interpreting SERP listings (SERP = Search Engine Results Page). Admittedly, SERPs from Google and the other main search engines typically offer unreadable gibberish rather than decent website descriptions. Still, an expert searcher (like me) can look at the listings and predict a destination site’s quality much better than average users.
When it comes to search, users face three problems:
Inability to retarget queries to a different search strategy
Inability to understand the search results and properly evaluate each destination site’s likely usefulness
Inability to sort through the SERP’s polluted mass of poor results, whether from blogs or from heavily SEO-optimized sites that are insufficiently specific to really address the user’s problem
Given these difficulties, many users are at the search engine’s mercy and mainly click the top links — a behavior we might call Google Gullibility. Sadly, while these top links are often not what they really need, users don’t know how to do better.
I use “Google” in labeling the behavior only because it’s the search engine used by the vast majority of our test users. People using other search engines have the same problems. Still, it’s vital to reestablish competition in the search engine field: it would be a tragedy for democracy to let 3 guys at one company determine what billions of people read, learn, and ultimately think.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/user-skills.html
