An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant.
Note from Gary: Chris Sherman and I celebrated last week the 6th anniversary of of our book, The Invisible Web, being published. In my view, the invisible or -- if you prefer deep -- web is larger now than ever before.
Wait. Hasn't crawling and other web technology improved? Yes, it has. That being said, there is still PLENTY of deep or invisible material.
Certainly, there is a massive amount of material now available -- some formerly invisible -- because the web continues to grow in size and scope. But why is the invisible/deep web actually larger as well? Because searcher habits haven't changed all that much.
As this study points out, it's all about those first few results. Period!!!
To put it another way, there are x amount of pages in the front section of a newspaper and likely more ads that can fit. Every webmaster wants to be in the first few pages. On the web, advertisers want their pages (not paid ads) listed in the "organic" search results (the plain ol' links). But just as every ad can't be on the upper righthand corner in the first few pages of a newspaper, every webmaster's site cannot fall within the first few web search results.
There are also search engine optimizers working to get their clients' pages as close to the top as possible. Though some do it "below the radar," most are up front -- using reverse engineering and largely ethical techniques to get the job done. This is not a good or bad thing. It's just the way it works, so get used to it.
This is why we recommend using more than one search engine, taking advantage of advanced search techniques, narrowing/focusing, and remembering that info retrieval is often an iterative process. And we need to think about using specialty engines when appropriate; more and more are coming online daily.
As info pros, we should strive to make our end users better searchers. And perhaps more training is necessary to make better searchers increasingly aware of their web search surroundings.
Shirl's note:
Rarely a week goes by that I don't hear from one of my customers/patrons/end-users some variation of "I couldn't find it 'in Google.'" I know what they mean, of course, but I always feel obligated to explain (tactfully and gently, I hope) what a search engine is and how it works -- and why they might get different results if they try different engines.
We know we are more or less preaching to the choir here about empowering our users. But -- and this is highly dependent on where you work -- don't assume that people know about or understand even the most basic things about web searching -- i.e., using quotation marks to search by phrase, using AND/OR, using the minus sign to exclude words. But always assume that what they really want is to find the information they need in the shortest amount of time possible, with the least amount of effort. If information-finding is not their primary job, they often have a low level-of-frustration threshold. They think they should be able to find whatever it is.
They need your help. Not necessarily to find it for them -- but to show them how to find it themselves. Teach a man to fish...yada yada yada. It's true, you know.
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