The Impact of Search Engines

Why People Love Search Engines

Search engines empower us to quickly and easily find, compare, learn and shop. We don’t need to scour the Internet site by site. That virtually-impossible task has been achieved for us. Search engines increase their popularity by focusing on search aspects that are important to users:

  • Search results that load faster
  • Search results that are most relevant to the search terms entered
  • Delivering the most current information
  • Search engines even help us when we misspell or mistype our search terms

Search Engines… Save Time

When we want information, we use the handiest resource possible. It must be accessible and pain-free. To be pain-free, it must be less costly than other resources (requiring less time, money or frustration). The most popular search engines deliver efficient, effective results. Hands-down, search engines create a true win-win relationship with users.

Search Engines… are Trustworthy

Because we are actively involved in locating information on search engines, we feel empowered. We can compare, discriminate, believe, criticize, choose, share and buy. We believe that the search results we’ve “found” are objective, therefore credible and trustworthy.

Businesses Want to Rank Well

Does your current web content fulfill your targeted customers’ needs and expectations? Search engines use content relevance to rate how high it will appear in search results for specific search terms. Relevance can be enhanced by making your content accessible, complete, accurate, engaging and current. Search engine optimization is a method of boosting your site’s ranking performance through changes made to the content and to the coding. For competitive industries, it’s important to utilize SEO strategies so your website will appear higher in the search engine results.

Businesses Want to Know How Customers Search

If you are a Dog Groomer and there are over one million websites related to dog grooming, obviously they cannot all be listed on the first page for “dog groomers”. Are there other search terms your customers might type into search engines? Do you offer other services that they might be looking for specifically? Since different people use different search terms to find the “same things”, the chances are pretty good that different websites will rank just as well – but for other search terms. For example, if your dog grooming business is located in Milwaukee, you’ll rank higher for “Milwaukee dog groomers” than a dog grooming service that’s located in Chicago. To rank higher than your competitors, learn more about our Professional SEO Services 

How Search Engines Impact Marketing?

How Google makes improvements to its Search Algorithms

The Results of User Trust in Search Engines

  • Most users input two or three terms in search engines.
  • Searchers believe the best results are on the top. A study conducted in 2004 by Granka, Joachims & Gay, found that most searchers only view and click on the top two results returned by search engines.
  • Most users only click on one of the search results. They are either sufficiently satisfied with the result, alter their original search terms or move on to other tasks.
  • Searchers typically clicked the number one search result more often than the number two ranked item
  • Most searchers rarely go to the second page of search results.
  • Search result success will vary from one user to another. Search results are greatly impacted by individual user’s web experience, age, cognitive abilities, search strategy experience and the purpose of their search goals.

Additional sources: Jansen, Spink, Bateman & Kirby; Pan, Hembrooke, Joachims, Lorigo, Gay & Granka. For source details, see References at end of the page. Based on their own rating system, search engines are trying their hardest to scour and rank all the web content so they can produce the best information for you – whenever you ask for it.

What are Search Engine Algorithms?

Search engines use algorithms (complex formulas and rules) to help them find, collect, evaluate, organize and deliver content that has been published to the Internet. Search algorithms are periodically updated to improve the quality of their search results. The algorithm updates made by Google throughout 2011 have been focused on filtering out low-quality web pages. As defined by Google’s Algorithm, low-quality web sites contain:

  • Shallow content
  • Poorly written content
  • Content copied from other websites
  • Excessive advertising when compared to the relevance, value and web experience delivered to visitors

googleGoogle’s current algorithm is named Panda and its changes are referred to as Caffeine Updates. Google isn’t the only search engine that builds and uses an algorithm. A successful search engine will receive a higher volume of returning search users. These searchers are their customers. To keep their customers happy enough that they’ll continue coming back, search engines need to deliver highly-relevant results in a clear, fast format. Consider why you continue using your preferred search engine. How does your search engine make you happy? To view an interesting visual graphic that clearly illustrates the “Life of a Search Query”, check out this infographic by Google – Under the Hood.

REFERENCES
Granka, L., Joachims, T., & Gay, G. Eye-tracking analysis of user behavior in WWW search. Proceedings of the 27th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (pp. 478-479). New York: ACM Press.
Pan, B., Hembrooke, H., Joachims, T., Lorigo, L., Gay, G., and Granka, L. In Google we trust: Users’ decisions on rank, position, and relevance. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(3), article 3. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/pan.html
Jansen, B. J., Spink, A., Bateman, J., & Saracevic. T. Real life, real users, and real needs: A study and analysis of user queries on the Web. Information Processing and Management, 36 (2), 207-227.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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