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Most of WW posters will fit into the 'expert' category I guess. Are you looking for/using alternative sources to Google? If you are is this an increasing trend for you?
Microdoc claim that Google need to get into RSS feeds/blogs which would go hand in hand with the recent blogger acquisition.
[edited by: heini at 5:39 pm (utc) on April 26, 2003]
I'd love to know what search tool all these so-called experts have switched to. The survey also says Yahoo use has almost doubled in one month; are power users switching en masse to Yahoo?
Surveys by Microdoc News are conducted on a site that runs surveys and do not reflect the name of Microdoc News in any way. We draw out sample from three sources:
1. A mailing list of people we have been surveying for the last four months;
2. Advertisements we run using a text advertising service on popular sites;
3. Other sites which review ways of doing things on the Internet and which are used most often by new Internet users.
We do not advertise to Microdoc News users that they can go and do a survey as we then do not get a good sampling.
Any other questions, I would be happy to answer.
Can you shed any light on what those 24% of people now use to search the Net? Other search engines? Blogger tools?
The 24% we have been analyzing the results. Here is the breakdown - 698 users -
420 say they use Daypop, Feedster etc.
210 say they use Link surfing
In comments at the end of the survey we have a sample of this view:
"Not that I think Google is bad, it is just that Google has a lag of 2 days before information gets into its database."
"I use other people's websites, and also Blogosphere, Daypop, and Feedster to find information now. Google is good, it is just that for my needs I am now working with RSS feeds and Google is not as responsive as some of the others."
There is also a feeling that these are people who are active in building new tools, like Feedster, Fresh Search, rsssearch, BlogDigger, Sherch, Waypath, and many different experimental tools in the world where Semantic Search maybe a possibility one day.
It's a totally incomplete and biased report.
This answers the question as to what the sampling was from. I have never heard of one of those and I'v been on the web for quite some time.
Perhaps in the niche group of people who participate in those sites, the use in down.
Do I care, no. Should I care no.
The average user who finds my site on whatever engine, has no clue as to what those others are. I'm not even curios enough to waste my time and visit them.
I think perhaps a better sampling of real world users would of been more accurate to use instead of using some off shoot group of people just so an article could be written for Micro Docs blog.
"Not that I think Google is bad, it is just that Google has a lag of 2 days before information gets into its database."
As you can see, this site is visited by webmasters who have got used to lags of 1-2 months, or more. For my research, slightly stale information will suffice, and Google does a good job at it but I can see that some users with urgent needs might go to other sources. Different market segments, in my view. (What do you think of Google News? Isn't there almost no lag?)
We love Google and consider it to be the best way to search the Internet.
However, we believe that there is a trend just starting to move where "crawling" as a means of obtaining information to place in a search database may be challenged in the future.
Key technologists are beginning to talk that way -- and it is going to be interesting to see whether this will become popular.
With Google Inc's public relations and media coverage, the awareness of Google is increasing. This is the first survey we have done where all of the self-confessed newbies to the Internet indicate they use Google. Before this we had 67% (March), 45% (February), 32% (January) -- this we believe is due to the excellent coverage in the media. Many new to the Internet in the last three month do not know who Yahoo is.
Yes, results may be skewed. We are not reading too much into them, but we think there is the beginning of a trend there.
GOOGLE NEWS?
Yes, there is no time lag there. However, Google News is limited to stories from edited sources. Blogs are not inlcuded there, for example.
Surely it couldn't be like AltaVista or something, or they wouldn't be "experts"... (in my book anyways.) :P
AllTheWeb I could understand, decent search engine, probably what I would use if Google didn't exist.
To test my theory I went to one those other sites mentioned and conducted a search. Feedster to be exact.
Not only did it not come close to what I was looking for, it was completly out of the ballpark.
I then conducted the same search on Google and found what I was looking for on the first page.
1st impressions mean a lot to me. I will never go back to that other site again because it produced totally useless results.
I think the title of this thread and the Micro Dot article title should of been "Niche Group of Users move away from Google." That would of been a more accurate description.
I think the Microdoc report is completely biased. Plus, how can you make a valid survey with only 2,900 people while there are about 500,000 using Google any day of the week?
Biased? Probably very much. However, if the sample is unbiased, surveying 2,900 people can give good estimates within 2-3%. Remember presidential election polls conducted on about 1000 people?
However, we believe that there is a trend just starting to move where "crawling" as a means of obtaining information to place in a search database may be challenged in the future.
I too think the model, while still the best for common searches and would probably remain so for near future, has become slightly outdated. What will replace it, I don't know but Google has strong support from business communities and that matters a lot. Moreover, to play safe, Google has already bought the Blogger.
Having established my google loyalty, I think I can safely say that there's been a bit of missing the point going on here.
From Feedster's site: "[Feedster] was built for the purpose specifically of searching RSS feeds solely, not web pages. We're clearly oriented towards current information and the way we index is at the Post level not the Page level"
The goal of these types of sites is indexing quickly changing opinion and information from blogs. For entertainment, I love using the top40 list on Daypop; it never fails to provide interesting and thought provoking material.
Google still rules, but not everyone has the same goals when searching.
Its got less to do with the size of the sample that it is to do with the dempgraphics or the sample. Even a small sample can be very representative of a target group if it is chosen carefully.
Thanks for popping in microdot. The only thing i would have done differently is to make it clear in the item the breakup of the sample, so people know whose opinions the results are reflecting. What you posted here re sample recruitment would have been great to have on the actual item. Maybe the questionnairre could have been imporved too. A few leading questions etc, but thats a small point. And im still not sure how you define "novice" and "advanced" users.
To my mind, any survey results are worthless unless you know at least some info on the methodology. The more the better, and the boring methodological details can be provided on a different page linked from the "newsy" new peice.
As i said in my first post, now that I DO know the breakup of the sample, I am not surprised with the results at all. It seems the sample would include a lot of "early innovators" and "experimenters", people who like to try something different, and people wh spend a lot of time online finding information.
I don't see myself moving away from Google for my day to day searches anytime in the near future.
Google still rules, but not everyone has the same goals when searching.
I agree and in support of that idea let me share with you one of the emails I have received subsequent to the survey from one of the survey takers:
"While once I searched for information in general, I now seek information from blogs only. Thus, to blog topically, I need a search tool that will tell me what someone has written an hour ago. I cannot wait 2 days. That is why I no longer use Google. If I was to search for general information from any site, I probably would be straight back to Google. There is none better."
I think the Microdoc report is completely biased.
Without a doubt Microdoc News surveys are biased. Biased towards those people who will do the survey and biased towards those who like filling in forms, and biased towards the more extroverted of our number.
Having said that, what a survey does tell us is an early pointer to a trend -- or even a trend. That this number of people will tell us they have stopped using Google is interesting. This does not tell us the number, but it does tell us there are people who seriously are thinking like this.
This is interesting and is a pointer to more extensive surveys -- to find out how significant this new activity is. We may find it totally insignificant. Or we may find that this group has existed all along.
What we cannot do is discount it outright -- we do that at our peril of not locating new trends. However, in the past, from our sruveys we have found significant trends early, and I am suggesting that this is another of these.
Maybe the semantic web proponents are having an effect!
