Let me quote from A Simple Guide To Understanding The Searcher Experience by Shari Thurow to start this post:
Web searchers have a responsibility to communicate what they want to find. As a website usability professional, I have the opportunity to observe Web searchers in their natural environments. What I find quite interesting is the “Blame Google” mentality.
I remember a question posed to me during World IA Day this past year. An attendee said that Google constantly gets search results wrong. He used a celebrity’s name as an example.
“I wanted to go to this person’s official website,” he said, “but I never got it in the first page of search results. According to you, it was an informational query. I wanted information about this celebrity.”
I paused. “Well,” I said, “why are you blaming Google when it is clear that you did not communicate what you really wanted?”
“What do you mean?” he said, surprised.
“You just said that you wanted information about this celebrity,” I explained. “You can get that information from a variety of websites. But you also said that you wanted to go to X’s official website. Your intent was clearly navigational. Why didn’t you type in [celebrity name] official website? Then you might have seen your desired website at the top of search results.”
The stunned silence at my response was almost deafening. I broke that silence.
“Don’t blame Google or Yahoo or Bing for your insufficient query formulation,” I said to the audience. “Look in the mirror. Maybe the reason for the poor searcher experience is the person in the mirror…not the search engine.”
People need to learn how to search. Search experts need to teach people how to search. Enough said.
What a novel concept! If the search engine/software doesn’t work, must be the user’s fault!
I can save you a trip down the hall to the marketing department. They are going to tell you that is an insane sales strategy. Satisfying to the geeks in your life but otherwise untenable, from a business perspective.
Remember the stats on using Library of Congress subject headings I posted under Subject Headings and the Semantic Web:
Overall percentages of correct meanings for subject headings in the original order of subdivisions were as follows: children, 32%, adults, 40%, reference 53%, and technical services librarians, 56%.
?
That is with decades of teaching people to search both manual and automated systems using Library of Congress classification.
Test Question: I have a product to sell. 60% of my all buyers can’t find it with a search engine. Do I:
- Teach all users everywhere better search techniques?
- Develop better search engines/interfaces to compensate for potential buyers’ poor searching?
I suspect the “stunned silence” was an audience with greater marketing skills than the speaker.
Hi-
Wow, you cannot possibly be so ignorant to take my statements out of context. I stand corrected. That is EXACTLY what you did.
3 things need to work well together to get a positive searcher experience. That is what the article was about. You only picked one. What about the others? What about the website owner’s responsibility to communicate aboutness and information scent?
My graduate work is in LIS. My scholarly publications are in LIS. Honestly, subject headings are not “taught” to the general public. I didn’t get that course until I was in graduate school and specifically in an LIS program.
Stop playing the blame game. Take responsibility for your contributions to the searcher experience. Get off your proverbial high horse. You fell right into the blame game…and therefore, people like you with your ignorant attitude is one of the reasons that the searcher experience is so poor.
What a novel concept! Maybe information scientists’ attitudes and willful ignorances contribute to the negative searcher experience. Read Andrei Broder’s work. That would be a start on your road to being educated properly about Web search.
Comment by sharithurow — October 4, 2012 @ 7:08 am
I started to not approve this comment as abusive and uninformative. But, since I am the one being abused, I thought that might smack of censorship.
The audience can judge for themselves whether you were blaming users when you said:
That you now regret a poorly worded post or a bad attitude towards users, isn’t my problem.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — October 4, 2012 @ 1:30 pm