Search engines are huge time wasters

Friday, 16 October 2009 |

Search engine users - that's you and me, amongst millions of others - are being fooled. The likes of Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL and others have helped us believe that search is fantastic, that it is productive and that it really helps us in ways that were not possible without the internet. True, we can find information through search engines very easily - but at what price?

Most search results fail to produce what we are looking for (data from Keyword Discovery)

There is a psychological phenomenon known as "social acceptance theory". If something becomes accepted wisdom by a large enough group of people, we all believe it because to do otherwise would mean falling out of line, being too different. Millions of people believe, avidly, that search has changed their lives. And they are right. Google and their competitors have revolutionised the way we get information making it faster, easier and more convenient than ever before.

But because we are so convinced by the positives, we ignore the negatives about search engines. What we don't see - even though it is staring us in the face - is the abject failure of search engines to find what we want. Take one search as an example. I want to find a project manager based in Reading. So I pop off to Google and type in "project manager reading uk". What do I get? A list of sites with job adverts - people who are advertising for a project manager's job in reading. That's not what I wanted. You might say I failed to give Google a detailed enough search term but equally it failed to interpret my keywords accurately enough.

This is a common problem. Indeed, most of the time Google fails to produce what we want. According to the latest figures from Keyword Discovery, only 48% of people click through to a search result having typed something into Google. You know as well as anyone else that often when you type in something to Google, you can see that the results presented were not what you were looking for, so you try another search phrase. With 52% of our searches failing to produce what we want, this means that more than half of your time on Google is completely unproductive.

Traditional wisdom has it that we go back to Google and type in a longer phrase, but the latest data on search phrase shows that we are actually reducing the number of words we type in - not increasing them. A year ago only 30% of our searches were a single word, now that's risen to 46%. This suggests that we have given up trying to be specific with our searches because we know that what we get is still not what we want, so we may as well save a bit of time and only type in one word and still get a bunch of rubbish.

For instance, if I type in just "project manager" into Google, the first handful of results are not about jobs but about being a project manager and project management. Plus there are useful sites such as Wikipedia in the list which might help provide links to other sources of information in my hunt for a project manager in Reading. In other words, Google has been more accurate with the shorter keyword phrase than with the longer one; it has provided me with leads that could help, whereas the longer, seemingly more accurate phrase, led me in the wrong direction.

Worse than all this is the fact that 40% of searches we make are for stuff we have already previously searched for. In other words we are not actually "searching" but instead we are simply "re-finding" something - using Google rather like a telephone directory instead of a "sophisticated" search engine. Yet, the fact we use Google constantly throughout the day means we are so familiar with it we don't see its faults. Combine that with the need to be seen to be part of the group - social acceptance - claiming that Google really helps, and you have a potent mixture for missing the obvious.

Google is wasting your time. This is especially true if you are in business. If you spend around an hour a day on Google, half that time is unproductive. Multiply that by 10 employees, say, and you've lost five hours of work a day - every day. Add to this the fact that because search marketing is seen as important, you now spend even more hours planning, analysing and working on pay per click campaigns for instance. All to produce adverts in a system that mostly fails to deliver what your potential audience actually wants and which we all spend unnecessary hours using.

Now it's true that people can demonstrate increased business as a result of search marketing and it's also true that with the right kind of good SEO you can show more traffic to websites via the search engines. But if I put a big yellow bucket on every street corner in town with copies of my ebooks in it, people would take them and I'd be able to "prove" that "yellow bucket marketing" is the way to go. In other words, you are bound to find that search marketing works because that is what you are doing. Do something else and that too will work. Just because search marketing succeeds does not mean that an alternative will not be better. There is a real possibility that people have become so hooked on search dues to familiarity and social acceptance theory that they are missing a better alternative.

And it looks like Google - as well as the other search companies - have also had their eyes closed to an alternative to search which is now biting them on the rear end. Asking people.

Before search engines were invented that's what you did when you needed help, a solution to a problem, information or advice. You simply asked someone who you thought would know the answer or would know someone who would know. But along came search and we all fell into the trap of thinking it is marvellous. But now, as social network search facilities improve we are discovering in our millions that we can do what we are naturally inclined to do, and that is ask someone. So you can go on to Twitter or LinkedIn and ask people for an answer to your particular problem. Within moments you have an answer and often a link to the very site you need to go to.

People on social networking sites are more accurate than any algorithm fancy engineers can produce at working out what you really mean. You ask a question, say, on Twitter. You get several answers and useful links which you can then go to. No wasting time with useless searches, no wasting time with having to type in different words and no wasting time going to sites that didn't fulfil their pay per click promise. Asking other people is what we prefer to do, it's what works and it's faster and therefore increases our productivity.

Search engines have their place. They certainly do help us and have enabled many businesses to thrive, including mine. Yet we might be missing the obvious because we are all facing in the wrong direction. Search may not be as great as we think it is. Social search may well be the future because it is the past.

8 Comments

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Christopher makes this comment

Friday 16 October, 2009

There is a lot of truth to this but I think that you are being a bit hard on Google. If you click on the "show options" at the top of Goggle results, it allows you search visited or non visited sites. As for the social networking searches, they tend to have a much narrower field of results. Someone performing a search on a social networking normally preforms is doing a much more targeted search just by using it. I have been wasting time playing with different search engines, comparing results at times a Google comes out on top every time. They certainly aren't doing a good enough job though and as the number of web pages grows, their job gets more difficult.
Graham Jones makes this comment

Friday 16 October, 2009

Christopher, thanks for your comment. Perhaps I am being a bit too hard on Google, but they are big enough to take it...! I think you are right about the narrowness of social networking searches. Also, I agree that Google often seems to get the better results. Yet that might be perception. If you look at the table you'll see that AOL receives more clicks on its search results than Google, beating them by 10%, which suggests their search results are better - which is strange because the AOL site uses Google to produce its results...! The AOL success may have something more to do with layout - the organic and PPC results are differentiated more easily and you only get a single column of results. AOL is getting better organic and better PPC click throughs than Google, which suggests it is a design issue for Google, rather than anything to do with search itself. The more you look into search, the more you realise how dependent it is upon understanding human behaviour.
Dorothy Beach makes this comment

Friday 16 October, 2009

You sound so impatient! Yes search engines are imperfect - I agree with that - but be careful - they are morphing as we speak. Shally Steckerl of arbita.net did a nice research paper on search engines and how they differ and where they are going - "Semantic Search" which you can access here for free: http://bit.ly/t1G7Q. Tools are going to get smarter and will learn from you as to what you want. Strings will go away and the web robot or search engines you use will even suggest other resources (to prevent tunnel vision). Your crowd sourcing suggestion is real- and depends on your network - some will engage when you ask a question but most do not unless you have a very strong brand (think Ophra). A strong brand means YOU engage a lot and that takes time. Most recruiters just aren't there yet to depend on their networks to give information the way you suggest.
Graham Jones makes this comment

Friday 16 October, 2009

Dorothy, thanks for commenting. I didn't mean to sound impatient. Even so, search is 15 years old, so they ought to be better by now. Most of Google's "improvements" over the years haven't been real improvements to search, but systems to stop "black hat" techniques of SEO. And semantic search, that's been promised for at least 10 years since Google began. I remember being at a meeting shortly after the launch of Google to be told it was only really a temporary things because it would be replaced by semantic searching. No sign of that yet...!
Gidseo makes this comment

Sunday 18 October, 2009

OK, so let's take your word for it - search engines are a waste of time - may I presume you'll be happy to start the experiment and you'll not use a search engine for the next year? No, thought not - because whilst they may not be perfect (Bing even less so than most) they are an extremely useful tool. Let's face it, the success of Google is testament to it. http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/10/googles_udi_man.html is well worth reading - to see the continuing work into making them even better. Stats that are worthy of note, and ridicule, 'According to the latest figures from Keyword Discovery, only 48% of people click through to a search result having typed something into Google.' What percentage of these people did not need to click because they'd already found the answer. May I suggest a title for a future post: Operating Systems are a huge waste of time - they do nothing fundamentally different from DOS...
Graham Jones makes this comment

Sunday 18 October, 2009

Gidseo, thanks for the comment; perhaps you are taking me too literally. If, as you say, the 52% of people who did not click had already found the answer, why were they searching? If they already know the answer, what's the point of wasting time on search? Also, as I said, search engines are powerful and useful; that's not the point. The point is the way we use them. It's our failures to use them effectively that is actually leading to Google's massive profits. If we spent less time searching for things we already knew the answer to they'd probably make less money. And just because Google has announced record earnings does not mean it is "right". Drug dealing organisations have earned record amounts of money in recent years but that doesn't mean they are doing the right thing. Equating financial success with usefulness is a weak argument. Of course, I am not comparing Google to drug dealers, I'm just saying the notion that money=success is not the only way of looking at things. Google is doing many good things, but it fails to provide results that are good enough (they admit that too) - and that's the issue. When we get weak or poor results we are time-wasting. If you don't believe me, get agreement to record some people during their daily work and see how much time they spend on search and how much time they then spend on the resulting web pages. I'm confident you'll get loads of time being spent "wasted" - fruitless searches, seconds only on resulting web pages with no real information gleaning. That's before we get into whether or not the web sites we go to actually engage us. Businesses are losing hours and hours every day because search engines fail us, we're not very good at using them and resulting web sites are often poor and inaccurate. And as for operating systems being a huge waste of time - ask those businesses who upgraded to Vista from XP. They have lost weeks of productivity in some instances. Besides which there are many things which are faster and more productive with pencil and paper than with a computer, so in that instance an operating system is certainly a time-waster.
Gidseo makes this comment

Monday 19 October, 2009

Re. the people searching - they did not necessary know the answer already but were provided with the answer in the results ie if I wanted to find the telephone number of a great sushi restaurant in Bristol and Google for Obento tel - I get the phone number without clicking on the results. For me the search has provided me with the number and saved me the expense of dialling directory enquiries but KD regard it as a failure/waste of time. On the subject of drug dealing Freakonomics is rather enlightening but I agree with your tenet that financial success doesn't imply correctness - one word supports your argument - bankers! Back to Google - I presume you feel you benefit from the analytics they provide to you freely and the traffic they bring to your site - free of charge. You're not forced to click on the paid listing and nobody else is. Nobody is forced to advertise with them ie all their income is voluntary. I maintain that life is much easier with search engines... even without the freebies!
Graham Jones makes this comment

Monday 19 October, 2009

I'm not really disputing that life is easier with search engines; I agree, it is easier. But we are often fooled into believing something is easier when in fact it is not. Millions of people believe they are saving time with Google, when in fact, an alternative method of finding what they want would be quicker.