Go deeper - join us!
A relatively new survey sheds some light on how much time Internet users are spending poring over search engine results, as well as the unsurprising revelation that they aren’t exactly thrilled to be doing so.
The survey–conducted and processed by Scorpion and Dynata, and analyzed by Search Engine Land–involved 1000 participants, a whopping 54% of whom admit that they find themselves browsing search engine results for longer periods of time–on account of looking through notably more results–than they did five years ago.
Fifty-one percent also indicated that they spent more time searching for services than they did five years ago, pointing to potentially confusing or disingenuous search engine results organization on Google’s side of things.
The usual frustration with ad relevance, prevalence, and positioning in searches is salient in the survey results, with only 12% of respondents saying that ads met their expectations when searching.
As Search Engine Land’s Danny Goodwin points out, this issue is largely predicated on a degradation of overall search result quality, which–despite the best intentions of AI and other search aides–ultimately falls on the consumer to spend more time verifying the accuracy of the results in front of them. Naturally, this is frustrating for the consumer; having to fact-check and compare what should be a simple search is something that takes a surprising amount of effort.
Of course, another possible rationale for this time sink and the ensuing dissatisfaction could be an increase in media literacy. As various generations have become more familiar with how search engines work–things like what indicates a sponsored post versus an organic one, and the value of prioritizing local, possibly hard-to-find search results over the most common ones–an increase in the amount of time spent looking for solutions was invariable.
On the flip side, even folks who want a simple, fast solution to a problem for which they search–the kinds of people who are eager for a quick and obvious answer right at the top of the results page–are finding themselves frustrated with the dearth of clarity afforded by things like AI-generated answers and sponsored content, forcing them to delve deeper into Google’s results.
At the end of the day, this is very much Google’s problem to fix, a process that will undoubtedly prove to be lengthy–and dissatisfying in the interim.
