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How many search engines do you use?

10th February 2009

People often don’t do what we think they do. Take search, for example. Just go into your local street and ask how people search for things on the Internet. There’s a fair chance you’d come back with some stats that showed most people use Google. The result is we think that most people search using Google.

Indeed, look at your web analytics and visitor information. You’ll probably see Google as a pretty high level referrer. And ask some – less dubious, I admit – Search Engine Optimisation “experts” and some will tell you that you should focus entirely on Google. The other search engines are “also rans” they’ll tell you.

But all is not as it seems in the world of search. Most people, it transpires use several search engines regularly. Instead of being loyal to Google, most of us are in fact “promiscuous searchers”, moving from one engine to another whenever it takes our fancy.

According to a report from Forrester Research, only one in five people are completely loyal to Google. The rest of us swap and change our search engines regularly.

What happens is we probably try Google first. Observation studies show that people try a short search phrase at first, expanding it a word or two at a time if they are unable to find anything suitable. After three attempts at Google, several people then try their luck with another search engine, most frequently Yahoo! after Google, these figures would suggest. This means that if you run your own business, don’t be lulled into a sense of security that if your web site does well on Google search results, all will be well. Eight out of ten people will be using other search engines, either as their main search engine, or as a supplementary to Google.

If you focus your search energies just on Google, you are potentially denying yourself a huge opportunity. Most good search marketing people will tell you this and explain the need to ensure your web site does well for all search engines. However, there are plenty of people who will tell you to forget the other engines. But in doing so you are denying significant exposure to people – 80% of all searchers according to these latest figures.

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Categories: Search Tags: , ,

Google makes a huge assumption – which could be wrong

6th February 2009

 

Eye tracking studies show a fairly constant pattern of where we look on a web page. Essentially, most of our attention is focused top left. Then we scan to the right and then zig-zag back and forth to roughly half-way down the screen before we give up. It’s almost exactly the same way that we look at a newspaper, a book, a magazine or any document. And if we come from a part of the world where we read right-to-left, guess what, the eye tracking is completely mirrored.

There is not a lot new that web site eye tracking studies can actually tell us, in general terms. They are useful for specific web sites, though, as it helps you work out the best place to position key items of your offering. It especially helps web site owners ensure they minimise distractions.

Google does lots of eye tracking studies and as they highlight in a blog post today, few people actually go beyond the first four entries in the search results list. Being on the front page is not enough for search engine optimisation; you need to be in the top three or four.

Google uses eye tracking studies to help it present its search results in a more appropriate way for us. However, their blog today shows they are making false assumptions, which could mean their proposed changes may devalue what they do.

Here’s what they say in their blog: “They [users] start from the first result and continue down the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it — or until they decide to refine their query.”

In other words, the first result – the one that Google’s algorithm supposedly reckons is the best answer to our question can get skipped in favour of a lower down result or in favour of better search terms. We’re all familiar with that – and so is Google. Few people actually find what they really want first time. And that means Google’s algorithm is not as good as they want it to be; otherwise we wouldn’t need to scan down the list or refine our search terms.

So it’s quite worrying then to read the next bit of the Google blog which says that the eye scanning result “suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.”

If people did find what they were looking for in the first two results, why, as Google says, would they need to refine their search terms? Equally, for many people the results below the first four are what are called “below the fold” – you need to scroll to see them on many screens. And few people will do that if they do find what they are looking for in the first four results, or see from that first handful of results that the search term needs refining.

Google’s assumption that their search results are what people are looking for is false. It may be because users have found what they are looking for, but it may be because they haven’t and therefore need to search again. Importantly, the “heat maps” which show how much attention our eyes pay to the screen are the same “heat maps” you get for a newspaper pages and books. So it may be nothing at all to do with how good the search results are, but it may be a learned response to viewing text-based material; we are simply repeating an established behaviour.

Having said all this, Google is right that their eye tracking studies are vital to help them improve what they offer us. But they do themselves a disservice by making false assumptions about the results their studies produce.

Get a heat map for your web site easily using the following services:

Clickdensity

Clicktale

Crazy Egg

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Categories: Search Tags: ,

Google search becomes more powerful – but are you taking advantage?

5th October 2007

Google appears to have added “blogsearch” findings to it’s main index which means if you blog, your entries can appear in the main Google search results within minutes. Here’s an example: my posting “Make the most of online opportunities” was published here a couple of entries ago. Within 12 minutes it was listed Number 2 on Google.com’s main search results for that phrase – Number 2 out of 5,080 – in less than a quarter of an hour. Now that’s fast.

So, how is Google achieving this? It seems to be using it’s blogsearch facility to enhance the Google index. What this means is that bloggers are getting greater opportunities to appear in the main search results, compared with “standard” web sites.

However, there are a couple of caveats. Google also appears to be using things like the overall size of your site and your update frequency. In other words, posting the occasional blog is less likely to bring you such impressive results. Furthermore, you need to ensure your keywords are used in your headings, otherwise you will not really gain from the benefit.

But what if you don’t have a blog? Then post entries onto Facebook or Ecademy for instance since these sites too will be indexed rapidly. Google is clearly giving static web sites the thumbs down. And that’s the direction your web site will be heading unless you have some means, such as blogging, of providing changes that Google can index.

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Categories: Search Tags: , , ,

Gatekeepers will become your search gurus

17th June 2007

Internet users are suffering increasing problems finding what they want. Often you will find that whatever you are searching for advertisers, or “aggregation” software brings to the top of the search engine listing material that’s not directly relevant. Clearly, the search engines attempt to bring you the most relevant results. However, with the explosion of online content, thanks to blogging and the likes of YouTube, the situation for search engines is going to get worse, rather than better. Try as they might to bring us relevant results, their failure rate is going to increase.

Take for instance Squidoo. This is a fantastic idea that allows anyone to set up a web page with information, links and so on. The problem is it is easy to hi-jack and for what are loosely called “spammers” to infiltrate the system. The same is true for MySpace or any of the social networking sites. Add to the mix the fact that anyone can use Wiki software to set up sites for open contributions plus the widespread use of forums and you can see the content that search engines need to index is exploding at faster than exponential rates.

And this is only the tip of the ice-berg. Less than 1% of the people who use YouTube actually contribute to it. Of the 85% of Americans who use the Internet, only 8% actually add anything to it – most are just consumers of the medium. The problems faced by the search engines now will be dwarfed into insignificance if everyone started contributing.

The inevitable result of increased contributions and the “pollution of search” by spammers and the like is the end of search engines as we know them. Already there are signs that Yahoo! had it right. In the dim distant past of the Internet, Yahoo! used human editors to decide what to provide to users. That, however, was time consuming and expensive.

Now, though, the vast increase in information and the easy ways in which people can exploit automated search engines, means that human editing is resurging. Jimbo Wales, the inventor of Wikipedia, has launched a human edited search engine called Search Wikia. Mahalo is another newcomer to search that uses human editors.

However, both systems – and the directory approach from Dmoz – suffer from one thing; they rely on volunteers to edit what’s available. That means what’s delivered as a result listing will not always be up-to-date, nor will you be able to rely on it or trust that a thorough search has been done.

The future for search clearly lies in “gatekeepers” – experts who provide narrow search facilities for specific topics. Want to know the latest on “Internet marketing” for instance? Then you would go to the organisation that uses human editors to search and rank the available pages on that topic and that topic only. These gatekeeping companies will be experts in their own particular field. They will catalogue and list things much more effectively as they will be able to spot the spammers. Their information will become more trusted than search engines and will be more up-to-date and reliable than volunteer editors.

Strange isn’t it? This is exactly how large libraries have always worked. If you want some information on music in a large library, you’d ask the music librarian. But if you wanted science information, you’d be pointed to another member of staff with expertise in that area. Once again, the Internet returns to what has been happening in the offline world for centuries. It will not be long before “googling” for something will be a distant memory, just like Yahoo’s human edited directory has faded from our minds. Bye bye Google.

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Internet marketers certain to gain from major search engine study

23rd May 2007

German researchers have conducted a massive study that will enable Internet marketers to gain higher search engine positioning. The research was conducted by Sistrix, a search engine optimisation company, and it looked at 10,000 different random keywords. The company analysed the top 100 Google ranked pages for each of those keywords. As a result, they have detailed information on one million web pages.

What they discovered was a series of important factors to get your pages to the top of Google for your particular keywords. Of all of the factors the most important was having your keywords in your “title tag” – the page reference that appears above the menu bar in the browser window. Importantly, though, this is not enough on its own; the title tag also needs to be in the body of the page several times. It appears that Google is checking to see if the page is actually about what the title professes it to be on.

If the domain name (the URL) is also the same or nearly the same as the keyword, then the page ranked more highly than pages without the keywords in the domain name. If the keywords were in the file path, this had no impact. So, what this means is you need separate domain names for your major keywords. Using those keywords as folder/directory names is not having any impact on search engine ranking.

Incoming links were also an important factor. The top result for each keyword had about four times as many links as the 11th result for the same word. What this means is that for each keyword you need specific links – not just links to your site, but to specific keyword rich pages. This is much easier to achieve with blogging than with general web sites, because people tend to link to specific posts.

Interestingly, page headlines (those in the H1 tags of the HTML) had no impact on a page ranking. Instead, subheadings had more of an effect. This is possibly because people have tended to stuff H1 tags with keywords and therefore Google has taken this factor out to prevent web site spamming.

How can you ensure you follow all these search engine ranking rules? Well, apart from creating separate web sites for each major keyword – something I have been advocating for the past couple of years – you should also be using blogs as a major marketing initiative as they are easier to achieve the right combination of links, title tags and so on. Equally, you can measure your site against this research by using something like Internet Business Promoter to help you ensure you are on the right track.

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Categories: Search Tags: , ,