Google, Yahoo search results suck….

I have been using Google (largely) over the past 3-4 years and realized that I easily get frustrated with current search engine capabilities. In many ways, I think the year-to-year incremental search result improvements don’t seem substantial. For a recent project that I am working on I have been trying to source data that can point to this phenomenon as being true.

How much time do consumers spend finding information on the internet? How many times are they successful? How many attempts (keyword sequences) do they need to come up with in order to find what they are looking for? I wonder whether any of the research firms have done this analysis?

According to JupiterResearch, March 3 2005 titled “Searchers Experience”, 40% of users find the results on the first page relevant. When you think about this number its an astounding gap in the value that services like Google and Yahoo provide versus what the consumer’s expectations are. However, my general impression is that we are quite satisfied as we dont really know what to compare a Google search result with. Unless we see some new startups with completely disruptive algorithms attacking the problem, we will have no yardstick to compare.

A tool like Yahoo Mindset can help us filter out the noise that we usually find with paid search. Do you think Google could ever dare to come out with such a product? Do you think Yahoo should replace its search engine with Mindset?

What if there was a service that could tell you who amongst your friends, social network, colleagues, groups, associations had knowledge of the topic you were researching before sending the result to Google or Yahoo? Would such a service ease our pain/frustration with current search engines?