Searching through the later pages of Google

Isn't it amazing how many pages people will search to find you?

[lioness]

It happened again. On one page on one of my sites, I've got a little blurb on 'how to yada-yada'. No great shakes. Surely not the holy grail of how to yada-yada. You won't be seeing my name & smiling little face next to the Nobel Prize on Yada-Yada.

Time and time again, I see people showing up on my website, after searching for 'how to yada-yada' on Google. When I do the search myself, I'm on the 3rd page, or later. It always makes me wonder. Surely, the top ranking results are much more appropriate for their query. I've looked, and there are some very good resources above me for this topic. In fact, I link to some of those top ranking queries as part of my how to yada yada blurb.

It always makes me wonder. What were they looking for, that they didn't find in the first 35 or so results, that caused them to keep looking? Is it due to poor keyword choice (typed into Google)? Is it due to poor results by Google? Why?

[4eyes]

I get traffic for the phrase 'rewire your house' cos it appears once on my SEO page.

2-3 hits a week regular as clockwork.

[Abrexa_UK]

We often have people searching for a phrase and then they just keep going, page after page, even on our little search engine. Someone yesterday looked at 225 (yes, 225!) SERPs for a single search phrase.

I suppose that there are various explanations for this kind of behaviour. Firstly that person might be looking for *every* site on a subject. Or if they choose a very general search phrase it may be that they have to filter through lots of irrelevant results to get to the sites that they want.

I sometimes think that people just want to see how far the results will go.

There is also the double meaning problem on search engines. Because there is no context to a search, Google has to guess what people are looking for. Hence a search for "Java" returns a whole bunch of programming sites, but nothing on the island of Java. It may be a couple of pages before someone sees the information that they are looking for.

Watching friends and relatives using the web, I think that many people surf the web in a permanent state of confusion and slight panic. They tend to click on the first thing that they see, or insist on reading every sentence on a page before deciding where to click. Bizarre behaviour and weird search phrases that people use no longer surprise me ;)

[ciml]

Accoring to an article on Google use in France [webmasterworld.com] (found and kindly translated by vitaplease), Google users are more likely to type in three or more terms.

Even so, too many users just keep ploughing through irrelevant results. The permanent state of confusion would be helped if people would just read their favourite search engine's help pages once a year.

[gsx]

Off point by not being Google, but Lycos has a bit at the bottom which reads [1 2 3 4 5] >>.

Clicking on '>>' takes you to results 50+ and no to what I would assume would have been the next page. You can get clickthroughs fom very low listings in Lycos because of this.

[yezariael]

Not to forget that most people dont scan result pages as intense as SEOs.

And that the quality of the results does not decrease a lot on later pages on most topics..

[rfgdxm1]

Time and time again, I see people showing up on my website, after searching for 'how to yada-yada' on Google. When I do the search myself, I'm on the 3rd page, or later.

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Be aware Google does allow changing the default # of lists per page. Dunno how many do so, but mine is set at 100.