Users Love to Search but Are Sometimes Naive

January 25, 2005

The Pew Internet & American Life Project just came out with a new report, "Search Engine Users," by Senior Research Fellow Deborah Fallows. (You can view the whole report in PDF at that link.)

The subtitle of the report gives you an idea of the somewhat paradoxical results of the study: "Internet searchers are confident, satisfied and trusting -- but they are also unaware and naive."

I can understand that conclusion, having observed many Web usability tests that in part studied users' attempts to use search engines. I've found that users love to use search tools, but they also have a lot of problems with them. In fact, on one Web site I worked on, I asked the Web technical team to remove the site search function entirely because it had such major usability problems. My feeling is that bad search is worse than no search at all.

But I digress. The Pew study focuses on Internet search engines rather than site search engines (although it is evident that usability issues enter the picture here as well).

As I said, Internet users love to search. Some of Pew's findings:

+ 84% of internet users have used search engines. On any given day, 56% of those online use search engines.

+92% of those who use search engines say they are confident about their searching abilities, with over half of them, 52%, saying they’re “very confident”.

+87% of searchers say they have successful search experiences most of the time, including some 17% of users who say they always find the information for which they are looking.

+ 68% of users say that search engines are a fair and unbiased source of information; 19% say they don’t place that trust in search engines.

Now comes the paradox.

Users (70% of respondents) told Pew that they don't object to the idea of having paid results on search engines; 45% said they would stop using search engines if the distinction between unbiased and paid results was not clear.

But in fact only 1 out of 6 users say that they can "consistently distinguish between paid and unpaid results." So they want to be able to tell the difference but most say they can't!

Here's what users think search engines should do to distinguish paid from unpaid results:

+ 42% say paid results should be labeled with words paid or sponsored

+ 20% say paid results should be listed with different size or color than other results.

+ 19% say paid results should be listed in a different section of results page from unpaid results

+ 12% say search engines should provide an explanation about their pay procedures in the results page.

+ 7% either said they don’t know or they refused to answer.

The study goes into a lot of detail to identify demographics of searchers, what they search for, which search engines they use and how much they trust the results they get.

AB -- 1/25/05