The State of Search: 7 of 10 Americans Experience "Search Engine Fatigue"

There's some great new data to support what we've been saying for two years now: Search has become a vast wasteland of clutter, noise, spam, and information.

A new research report conduted by Kelton Research, examines "The State of Search" and describes “search engine fatigue." People are actually giving up on searching because they can't find what they are looking for.

Here are some of the key findings:

-72.3 percent of Americans experience “search engine fatigue” (either “always,” “usually,” or “sometimes”) when researching a topic on the Internet.

--65.4 percent of Americans say they’ve spent two or more hours in a single sitting searching for specific information on search engines.

--More than three out of four (75.1 percent) of those who experience search engine fatigue report getting up and physically leaving their computer without the information they were seeking – either “always,” “usually” or “sometimes.”

One of the more interesting findings that seems to confirm the need for human-guided search:

When asked to name their #1 complaint about the process, 25 percent cited a deluge of results, 24 percent cited a predominance of commercial (paid) listings, 18.8 percent blamed the search engine’s inability to understand their keywords (forcing them to try again), and 18.6 percent were most frustrated by disorganized/random results.

Here's the press release that reflects some of the data and report's primary findings.

Comments

[fornls]

This is a well researched and relevant article. But what concerns me is why the search engines do not give you what you want. As search engines are not the only way to search for information on the web, one has to resort to various types of searching instead of wasting an hour.

So far in my life I never got any fatigue with search engines. Rather it was tough to follow the links and arrive at the correct website.

The results you get in search engine are very much dependent upon the keywords you are using. By thinking about possible keywords one can arrive at the site within a matter of minutes. All it takes is some patience and some knowledge.

Sometimes it may happen that you do not get what you want. That is only rarely. One can think about that before starting to search as some topics like from the corner of Srimad Bhagavatam book etc. are written very rarely and you cannot expect to find one. So simple thinking can go a long way to avoid this search engine fatigue.