British Web Users Search Less - But Find More

An update to my recent post about odd search behaviour, a colleague sent me a list to Jason Lee Miller's interesting article the opening paragraph reads:"Recent numbers are showing that Google is an even heavier hitter in the United Kingdom than in the United States. But it also appears that UK Internet users are conducting fewer searches, and finding what they need more often." The debate of course is whether this is a true cultural difference or one of coincidental accident.

UPDATE: 24.OCTOBER.2006

The search stuff just keeps coming. Boxes and Arrows have a great piece about search behaviours. Combine this with their notes on Quantifying the User Experience and suddenly I've got a compelling need to get inside our site's search logs ... what are people looking for and how?

Search And You Shall Find

Each day I take a look at my blog stats and today I was mortified to find someone had found the blog not, as I’d hope, by searching for ‘web usability blog’ or a specific topic like ‘ambient navigation signifiers’ but rather “when does Primark in Doncaster open”. Looking at the search result, we can see that my blog is third but the summary returned shows no relevance to the intended search, yet still it was clicked on, why? Do users systematically work their way down the list from top result to bottom? Why do people not make an assessment on relevance before they click? In effect, is this confirming Jakob’s hypothetical question in 2001 that “Some People Are Too Stupid To Serve”? Todd Miller has a short article “In Defense of Stupid Users” which makes some valid points. Nevertheless, I do still despair of some people. Anyway, I hope they enjoyed their visit and, for the record, Primark in Doncaster is open 9-5.30 Monday to Thursday, 9-6 on Friday, 8.30-6 on Saturday and 10-4 on Sunday. (Their website has the detail but alas did not appear in the natural search for the original query)

>> UPDATE: Silly me, they were looking for details of a new store which opened 19th October. Some bloggers are too stupid to write...