Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
"Go to Google and enter the name of a London hotel for which you'd like the homepage. You'll be confronted by pages and pages of hotel reseller aggregator websites, all offering to make the booking on your behalf. No, I just want the website of the actual hotel please, so I start scrolling down the list. I count myself lucky if I find the right URL within the first ten pages of hits.Let's try something else - some computer or home hi-fi product. Again I get a vast number of irrelevant websites, many of which are aggregators of not only Google but also Amazon or eBay. Tearing my hair out, try to dive into the search terms to find a way to stop it giving me all this unnecessary rubbish. And it isn't easy to do, since Google is giving me all this stuff deliberately.
I understand from fellow contributing editor Davey Winder that there are some magic incantations I can add onto the search terms to knock out a number of these aggregators. But this isn't the long term solution. The reality is that Google has thrown the baby out with the bath water for my daily searching, and I confess that I've gone back to Yahoo! for the time being. It's far from perfect, but I find things quicker. ...
... I don't know the definitive answer. What's clear is that the current model isn't working. And it's really sad to see a once-great product such as Google become corroded, polluted and rendered ineffective by third parties and its own internal workings.
So there you have it. This is the opinion of a respected pro magazine. If the rest of the business press pick up on this and it snowballs we could see Google being rattled severely. Could this be the thin end of the wedge?
My mom is not a technically savvy woman, but she likes her iMac.
When my mom wants to stay at a london hotel, she expects that she should be able to put its name into a search engine, any search engine, and find the hotel's homepage in the first page of hits.
If she doesn't get the results she needs, she's not likely to go find another search engine, or try to figure out more specific keywords, but to pick up the telephone and call directory assistance to get the hotel's number. And when that happens, we all lose out.
Take a look through your web server log files. What are your top search engine queries? It happens that the top query that brings visitors to my homepage isn't anything to do with my business exactly, it's the name of some defunct company whose name just happens to match a phrase that I just happened to use on my homepage. I get hundreds of referrals a month for this query, from people looking for support for some software package they used to sell before they went bust.
Would you say that this people are expert search engine users? When my site is google's #3 hit for that query. It's clear from how my site is listed in google's search results that my page is not what they're looking for.
How do you intend to educate these people to use search engines better?
Something you need to learn about marketing is that your ability to educate the public is very limited. If you're not able to get your message across with a bare minimum of effort on their part, they're just not going to get your message. If google is not able to serve up a London hotel's homepage on her first try just by giving the name of the hotel, my mom is not likely to try again.
I have one page that is in the top ten for some very popular, very competitive keywords. I can see in my webserver logs that there are hundreds of referring pages that link to my page. And do you know what I find when I look at these pages that link me? The title of the page will be some keyword combo, and then there will be a list of links to pages like mine, and some adsense ads. That's it. I have found HUNDREDS of these pages linking my article.
I am fortunate that my page actually has some relevant content. But the people who put those link pages there, they must do so because they expect to make money from them. People who come across those pages don't want what they find. If google were to rank those pages ahead of mine, or pages that like mine actually have some relevant content, then searchers will stop using google.
If none of the search engines are able to serve relevant results, searchers will stop using the search engines altogether and find another solution, such as a social bookmarking site like [del.icio.us...] - which, by the way, I am finding is referring increasing amounts of traffic to me, possibly because people are ALREADY getting tired of depending on google.
He came in with a bit of paper with the name of a local company written on it.
After starting up the browser, he typed "Google" into the URL bar, and hit enter.
An MSN search results screen came up, with "Google Website" as the top entry.
He clicked that, and was taken to the Google search page.
In the Google search box he entered yell.com and the Google search results that then appeared included a link to the website he wanted: the UK yellow pages.
He clicked that, and got to their search form. He entered the name of the company, and hit enter. He then clicked through various choices: including county and type of business, and so on.
I was distracted for a few minutes and when I looked back he was scrolling down a very long list of companies in some junk fake directory.
After just over 10 minutes, in total, he closed the browser window, logged out of the machine, and went up to the help desk and asked for a copy of the local telephone directory.
After 2 or 3 minutes, he was noting something on his bit of paper, handing back the phonebook and exiting the library.
As I left the library a few minutes later he was out in the car park talking on his mobile phone.
.
Having seen the name of the company that he had typed in at yell.com, I went straight to the Google search page and entered the name of the company and the town it is based in.
The first two results were directories, the third irrelevant to the required search, but the fourth was obviously it. The snippet contained the name of the company, the road it is in, and the telephone number.
How easy was that? It took about 15 seconds.
.
Is your average surfer really that totally clueless with technology?
Is your average surfer really that totally clueless with technology?
Absolutely. Unequivocably. Yes.
Do you know anyone who works tech support? The guy was pretty advanced just to know he could find stuff by using the search box.
A friend of mine was telling embarrassing stories about his mother and father in law in his weblog. I asked if they ever read it, and would be angry. He said they were unable to find anything on the web unless someone else had bookmarked it.
Ask anyone who has ever worked tech support for a consumer software product. My boss, when I did this, told me not to say "Click the OK button". He taught me to say "Click the OK button until it turns black". (This was on the old black and white Macs.)
One day I was helping someone, and he seemed all confused, so I finally asked him, "What's the name of the window that's in front of you?" And he said, "What's a window? Is it this big glass thing on top of my computer?" Now this guy was an extreme case, he seemed unable to perceive the UI elements on his screen as any kind of objects that he could manipulate. Instead, his monitor was a senseless mass of shifting shapes and colors that made no sense to him whatsoever.
Get someone like your mom, have them sit at your computer and watch them at your website while you do one of Jakob Nielsen's [useit.com] usability tests: give them a task to do, and see how they accomplish. Start with the PC turned off and ask them to find your website somehow. You might be surprised.
You have to understand, anyone with the technical savvy to operate a successful website and even to insert Adsense's javascript into their pages are going to be light-years beyond the average web surfer. It's easy to lose sight of the experience and expertise most people have with computers.
