Jakob Nielsen says that in their current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful - and these were "above-average" users. Instead, Nielsen reports, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.
That's a good reality check for the digerati...
2 comments:
As is often the case with Nielsen, there's too little info there for me to draw conclusions. For the kinds of users who cannot get to google.com in particular, it probably matters little what search engine they use. So the metric I'd want to see is not whether they made it to google in particular, but whether they managed to complete a web search through any engine.
Excellent point, Maarten. Nielsen's qualifier - "Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine" - seems studiously opaque.
The metric you'd like to see is exactly the one he doesn't break out. You've got me all suspicious!
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