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Six in 10 of those surveyed typed in just one word in order to find what they were looking for
Add in those who use two words, and that's four-fifths of searchers. Only 3% tie words together with quote marks, and 1% use other advanced search techniques to get better results.
And when results are returned, few people look beyond the initial links provided. "If it is beyond the first page, it is as if it did not exist," Dr Nielsen says.
Highly successful SEO (first page for one and two word searches) is clearly as important as ever, despite the world becoming much more fluent with the internet.
It goes to show that SE users still don't know how to use SE's to their full potential.
6 in ten is a pretty high ratio. How do users expect to find targeted results if they are only using 1 word terms?
It make developers lives a lot harder...
That article was a great find BTW
Did they say which word in particular ..they used ..?
Most people use very short words .....
Usually the same one ...
Which is why the most searched for thing is always "sex"
BTW ..."shurely"?
...........WHO? ; )
[edited by: Leosghost at 10:46 am (utc) on April 7, 2004]
6 in ten is a pretty high ratio. How do users expect to find targeted results if they are only using 1 word terms?
The sad thing is that users do expect to find results with single keywords. Often they give up if they can't find what they are looking for with a single keyword.
A bad example that I saw the other day on a non-webmaster forum was someone searching for 'java'. The poster said that 'she had looked everywhere on the search engines for it'. If only she looked on Google, the result she needed was at #1!
Does that meas that 0.05% of users use more than 2 KW's to find a result. If that's true, my Targetted terms are pretty much useless!
[fawny.org...]
Derived from the satirical press. Used as tag question for irony or double entendre: The gold medallist/Woody’s habitué (confirmed heterosexualist, shurely?!) addressed a press conference and issued impassioned denials (self-denial, shurely?!). Not a misspelling. It’s an adaptation of the usage of Private Eye and Frank, the British and Canadian satirical newspapers. The original Private Eye–ism, attributed to the speech impediment of Lord Bill Deedes of the Daily Telegraph, is “shurely shome mishtake?!”
There, that's my educational good deed for the day... :)
The report doesn't even talk about 2+keyword searches.
Does that meas that 0.05% of users use more than 2 KW's to find a result. If that's true, my Targetted terms are pretty much useless!
1 word searches = 60%
1 word searches + 2 word searches = 80%
therefore 3 word and more searches = 20%
Pretty good but still not all that high.
If GoogleGuy see's this, perhaps it would be a good idea to give search tips to users?
They need to be trained, otherwise they will never find my sites! lol ;-)
Thanks for the cultural update from the outside world ..John_Caius...
Whilst we're digressing ...
I once showed a video of "spitting image" to some people here....
They were amazed that you could broadcast such things ...
one of them said ...translated ..." if a tv producer here made such a thing he would commit suicide in the politicians manner by shooting himself in the head ........twice .."
....
What wordtr*cker and the rest should do is to suggest adding "sex" to the beginning of each keyword ..with a hyphen of course to maintain some discretion ...
thus catching 90% of all searches ...
This, however, was on an article in some niche IT journal on "next-generation" search and primarily focussed on searches that were site-specific (intranet within a company, customer service queries and such that are perhaps biased towards more advanced users). The key is, however, that in the same domain, there has been a big increase in multi-word searches in the last couple of years.
I suspect, however, that if I looked at my own google searches, many are and always will be single-word searches. If I don't get the result I want, then I do a more focussed search.
Tom
