January 24, 2005
Search me
Here's an interesting bit of research that ripped my head off. The Pew Internet & American Life Project just did a survey on how people search the Net. Among their findings:
Nearly half of searchers use a search engines no more than a few times a week, and two-thirds say they could walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives very much.
They could "walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives very much"?? This fascinates me, because my own experience is so radically, fundamentally, insanely different. During the workday, I use search engines several times an hour -- and for several extended periods during the day I'll be doing queries several times a minute. If I were to average it out, I'd say I probably do a search every 15 minutes while I'm at work at my desk. Obviously, I skew pretty far off to the side of the bell-shaped curve here because I'm a) a journalist, b) a technology journalist, c) a blogger, and d) someone who regards the Internet, functionally, as a part of my consciousness. Search engines aren't merely the way I find information: They're part of my basic thought processes.
Wow.
(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at January 24, 2005 10:30 PM
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I had a similar reaction, and in some of my recent user research studies I've seen enormous involvement and committment to search. I did a gut-check with a fellow ethnographer who had done a much more in-depth study of Internet usage and he helped me see that this is what I would refer to as a self-reporting issue. The premium, for many, is the value they get out of the Internet in terms of how it reflects on them and what they are able to accomplish. Search engines, nah - they are the means to an end, and people are all about the ends.
People under-report the amount of TV they watch, etc. What people say they do, or would do, etc. depends on how the question is asked and what the context is.
IMHO, natch.
Self-report bias could be a minor factor here, but I think the results of this research are more a reflection of the changing nature of the Web. An unindexed mass of pages made centralized search engines a necessity. These evolved into even more centralized portals. Now we're seeing these portals lose ground to decentralized blog networks.
I have a graphic design hobby. If I visit just one of my usual graphic design blogs, like Dave Shea's mezzoblue, odds are I can get to all the other blogs that are in my usual list, and discover new content *that I'm already interested in*.
The Web is becoming increasingly more social and decentralized in nature. I use Google pretty often, but classic internet search is just one of many, many access points at my disposal now.
Self-report bias could be a minor factor here, but I think the results of this research are more a reflection of the changing nature of the Web. An unindexed mass of pages made centralized search engines a necessity. These evolved into even more centralized portals. Now we're seeing these portals lose ground to decentralized blog networks.
I have a graphic design hobby. If I visit just one of my usual graphic design blogs, like Dave Shea's mezzoblue, odds are I can get to all the other blogs that are in my usual list, and discover new content *that I'm already interested in*.
The Web is becoming increasingly more social and decentralized in nature. I use Google pretty often, but classic internet search is just one of many, many access points at my disposal now.
While I agree with Johnathan's comment, I want to take this to a new level. I want do not only dispose of the need for search engines, but I want to get rid of my reliance on the address bar, and browse the internet entirely through a series of hyperlinks, starting at some point (my home page) and ending at some finite point of browsing.
It sort of leaves me to wonder what the hell the internet is for if people don't need to search for anything! I mean, yes much of our browsing is probably recurrent, but isn't one of the great features the vastness of the available content? It would be like having access to the worlds greatest library, with no catologue index. I would walk in past thousands of books, walk right up to the same copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, and sign it out again, and again, and again, like some sort of informational Groundhog Day.
I suppose having an address bar, or hitherto-unexplored links would be like pulling a few books off the shelf every now and again, but wihtout the search, how the hell do you know where to look?!
Search engines are indispensable, and especially with Firefox's advanced toolbar, it's like e-manna. Then again, that study you cited raises an interesting point: Are users fed up with the unreliability of search-engineered info? Do they rely instead on referred sites and preferred links? I'm not saying one way or the other, but I'm guessing for all the gains the Net has made, it has lots some of the faithful along the way.
For me, google has dropped of my scopes because of Wikipedia, del.icio.us and c2.com/cgi/wiki as a first call for anything. It is probably biased because i mostly do technical stuff as a developer, but the aggregated content on the wikis is so much faster - its like the yahoo index system, but decentralized so i know its going to be more focused.
These are really cool reflections on this.
It occurred to me that another reason I probably over-use Google is that I hate bookmarks and toolbars. This is partly an extension of the fact that I hate mice -- I regard them as an erognomic disaster, because they slow me down too much. (I can do almost anything faster by keystrokes than by using a mouse.) Thus, rather than bookmark a site, I'll hit control-L and manually input the URL, which for me is literally faster than reaching over and using the mouse and finding it on a bookmark list. Similarly, if I can't remember the URL, I'll control-L over to Google, and type in a two-word query that will bring up a page of search results for which the site I want is usually the top, or in the top three.
In essence, Google is part of my daily navigation system.
I'm the same way. I wish there was a keyboard shortcut for "I'm feeling lucky."
It's possible too that the people surveyed made a slight mistake... Firefox has the little google search field up in the menu at top, and I'm guessing that IE and AOL may have incorporated similar search fields. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if people were using these search fields, but answered that they don't use search engines because they don't realize that the field is the same thing as going to google's page.
"if I didn't type www.google.com into my browser, I must not be using search engines..."
I can think of countless examples in which people grow so accustomed to the end result that they forget, or fail to realize, what's under the hood.
wow - i use google ALL the time. i use it so much that before i got firefox, i downloaded the google toolbar so i could have that little search engine input right there. i know i'm probably not representative of the population at large either, since i went to CMU, grew up with the internet & am totally comfortable with computers, but all those people must not have been thinking of the times when they needed to know where something was, or its phone #, or just any of those tiny little bits of info that are vital at the moment but not worth recording anywhere. i almost can't imagine life w/o search engines! btw clive, thank you so much for this thought-provoking, intelligently written blog. i'm so glad there are other "infophiles" (my word) out there.
Jeeze. I can't imagine life without google. I use google for everything. For instance, when I'm typing an email, its faster for me to alt-tab to a window with an open google menue and search for a word that I'm trying to spell rather than using a spellchecker.
i'm not a technogeek but i am a writergeek and i use google for my home page
i use it to look up everything, including definitions, math calculations, translations, images, news, addresses, travel planning, shopping, and etc etc
it's become less useful now for pure information gathering but the portals are becoming better at that
i was one of those who would make the trek to the big university library or library of congress long after i graduated to do 'essential' browsing research i couldn't do at home or at the local library, but it's been probably 7 years since i used a library card, and at least 5 since i last made a trip to a science library and made reams of copies
kids these days take internet searches for granted (or at least the ones i know) but for people like me, internet searches are like the invention of the wheel
and the gmail search capability is quite useful, with the ability to highlight and drag a phrase to the search box and search mail or google
i even use google to keep tabs on google watch
so i would have to say wow too
:)
It's also the case that a great number of people live happy, healthy, productive, and fulfilling lives WITHOUT using a computer or being online all the time. It *is* possible, you know.
Shouldn't technology be an AID to living your life -- instead of actually BEING your life?
Heh. Sometimes I think that being alive is merely an aid to my using the Internet!
Really cool to hear everyone else's experiences. J., I'm the same way -- Google is now my spellchecker. It's particularly good for proper names, which word-processor spellcheckers are traditionally quite weak on.
Dominique, glad you like it here!
It might seem strange to geeks and those who use search engines frequently, but A LOT of people are still not very comfortable with search. They don't know the basic tips about what search engines to use when, or how many keywords to use. I almost feel the search engines should feature a very short list of the best tips on the main page on certain days - just to help folks get more out of the huge power that exists on many search engines.
Great post Clive!
i realised i was over-reliant on search engines when i started to feel the urge to google my real-world conversations to retrieve a certain phrase or joke that was just uttered.
Clive, no bookmarks?? Dude. That's crahzy - I've always said that if I were to be escorted out of the land of cubicles, the only thing that would matter to me before leaving would be getting my bookmarks out with me.
Perhaps we're overlooking the manner in which google is used..?
I for one, take a certain pride in my ability to tweak google for optimal output. At times I feel like a import tuner kid getting an extra 8hp out of his/her Civic by adjusting the timing belt. I've got a sneaking suspicion that the majority of collision detectors around here are also very adept with querying and leveraging all the functionality google has to offer - but it's important to note that at present, we're the exception, not the rule. Until two days ago my girlfriend had no idea that google could do an image search - now they've added video to the roster too.
I can commiserate with those that have all but abandoned search engines, if my personality wasn't such that I like to figure these things out, I'd probably say "to hell with it" and let MSN hold my hand on a guided tour of the interweb.
Lastly, with regards to spellchecking, google is good, but gurunet has been my guiding light and saviour for upwards of 4 years now. If you haven't checked out the free download, do so - it's well worth it.
http://www.gurunet.com/what_tools.jsp
google is implementing audio search as well, can't understand how that would work, but supposedly you can search for musical "phrasing" as well as other things, which is an interesting concept to music anoraks
and the google library project is potentially staggering, it will change the way our kids use books
the funniest search engine moment i've ever had was being at a friend's place trying to figure out how to compile and build some obscure piece of old-timey software on OS X (no geek jokes, please). my friend and i had no clue, so he hits google to see if anyone had worked through the install issues.
turns out we were relieved to find out that somebody had thankfully documented the entire process, step by step, with detailed troubleshooting notes. we praised the mighty power of the anonymous internet, though my friend was curious as to who would be geeky enough to write all this stuff down. it turned out... it was him. he had no memory of it.
me, i've completely divested most of my memory to the internet, with search engines as my lifeline. i can barely remember a single fact an hour after i've read it.
Ahahahaha! That's a wild story.
I feel that I only get a really good search one-third of the time. Many times there are things I do not search for because I know I am not going to find an answer to my question. I think lots of people have this problem. There is lots of information out there, but it is not all that useful. It is still hard to find the right search. If I did care as much as I do, I might be one of these people that say they could walk away.
