I bumped into a year old article I had bookmarked on my browser on how users were experiencing unreliable search results in Google Search. This was further substantiated by a research published by SEMRush. In this episode, I deep dive into:
The dissatisfaction amongst users with inaccurate Google search results
Understanding the factors that have made online search increasingly complex
Issues persisting with online search today
The likely route to a reliable and user-friendly online search
Dissatisfaction amongst users with inaccurate Google search results
Last year, Search Engine Journal referred to a study by SEMRush indicated that a certain percentage of people searching on Google “aren’t satisfied with the results… and need to refine their queries” to find what they are looking for. Some of the other findings indicate that some users may be having difficulty finding what they need on Google.
The article stated SEMRush mentioning, and I quote, “There’s a great deal of keyword refinement at play here. If we combine the number of Google clicks with the number of keyword changes, we see that almost 30% of people are either refining or extending their searches in some way.”
A tweet by Emily Velasco in late October 2022 went viral wherein she referred to Google Search becoming like a mall. One goes there out of habit but do not necessarily find what you are looking for. The SEMRush research threw up some very interesting data points:
31.6% of desktop searchers use 1-2 keywords.
31% of mobile device users search with 1-2 keywords.
38.2% percent of desktop users search with 3-4 keywords.
39.9% of mobile users search with 3-4 keywords.
Take note of this interesting data - 30.1% of desktop searches used 5-11+ keyword phrases, while 29.1% of mobile searches used the same amount of keyword searches.
Does this mean that people are using more keyword phrases because they are struggling to find what they are looking for?
Another data point indicated that more than half of the desktop users who performed two searches in a row, do so with keyword phrases that are similar by 60% or more keywords. This is an indicative evidence that searchers are struggling to find relevant search results. This percentage is lower for mobile users – 40%.
Online search has increasingly become complex
While I bumped into this story last year, I felt that these claims are still relevant to quite a degree even today. My curiosity on the subject led me to jump into this rabbit hole. Assuming that the SEMRush research data is accurate, that is. Google’s search algorithm is by far the most advanced algorithm having more than 200 ranking factors cutting across domain, page-level, site-level, backlinks, user interaction, and many more. The rabbit hole Internet has become, to be able to take an abstract user query and fetch the most accurate possible search results is a humongous task. Cross-referencing across a multi-dimensional data set is as complex as it can get.
If you step back a few steps and attempt to look at the larger picture, as an average user, searching content online is a multi-variate equation. Today, an average user’s online search journey has a plethora of options for sources and medium:
Search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or Duckduckgo
Device – mobile, laptop or desktop
Browser – Chrome, Safari, Bing or Firefox
Social media platform – YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Pinterest
Online shopping platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Ebay, Etsy, Walmart or Target
High domain authority or online publishing websites like Quora, Medium, Blogger, Tumblr, Substack, or Hubpages
Voice assistant – Google Assistant, Alexa, or Siri
Content types – Videos, audio, images, documents, or PDFs
Legacy, trade, and online media websites
News aggregation websites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Mashable or Discord
Regional websites
Corporate websites
This is not an exhaustive list by any means, and these may be mutually inclusive. Which of these or a combination of these will an average user utilize is highly unpredictable. There are a few predictable components of a user journey, though. For instance, a user is quite likely to use Google Search first to make an online search as Google enjoys roughly 92% of search engine market share. Plus, it is quite likely that this search would be done using Chrome browser on an Android mobile phone.
Beyond this point, the online search journey can pretty much lead to a social media platform or any kind of website to source the information. A significant number of these websites push their content – whether it is for informational or transactional purposes – using SEO and Google Ads to rank on the first page of Google search engine result pages or SERPs. Search engines and social media platforms do a fairly good job in indexing search data and serving the most relevant results for a search query. One may experience similar case in online shopping, publishing, and news aggregation websites, too.
If you consider all the permutations and combinations of the variables involved in online search, it has become increasingly difficult for an average user to find the sought information in one or two clicks. From a marketer’s perspective, this creates endless opportunities for targeting and re-targeting users who have the potential to become a customer. This has also led to growing demand for digital marketing expertise which companies fulfil either by building in-house teams and/or hire agencies specialised in this space.
Issues with the current state of online search
Looking at the current state of online search, there are multiple challenges that still remain:
Information overload – there is too much information for a user to sift through and find relevant and reliable information quickly.
Algorithmic bias – which can be inadvertently reinforced and perpetuated due to limited number of websites commanding higher domain authority due to content density and high traffic.
Fake news and misinformation which the world has been witnessing, especially in the recent past.
Ad-driven model of search engines can lead to a conflict of interest between serving the most relevant information and prioritizing paid ads.
Maintaining quality of search results is very difficult as websites with low-quality and spam content can sometimes rank high.
Shift towards mobile and voice search has introduced new challenges in understanding user intent and delivering accurate search results.
Multi-modal search across different content types like images and videos in online content continue to pose challenges to effectiveness of search algorithms.
Diversity of content types and devices has impacted how search results are presented in a user-friendly manner.
Semantic Understanding: Improving the understanding of context and user intent to provide more accurate and relevant search results is an ongoing challenge in natural language processing.
Keeping up with rapidly evolving technologies like AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to enhance search capabilities requires ongoing investment and development.
Likely route to reliable and user-friendly online search
These challenges are just a fraction of the entire gamut of building an effective algorithm for a search engine that delivers highly accurate and reliable results which require minimum clicks. And don’t forget the heightened user experience expectations we all have thanks to advanced mobile operating systems we use every day. In all of this, there are challenges, opportunities, and responsibilities for technology companies, users, and marketers.
Technology companies are doing their best to deliver the best possible search results in a user-friendly manner. The Google Search algorithm, for example, gets about 250 updates in a year. That’s an update almost every day of the year. Google News has a ‘Fact Check’ section that reports on misleading news published online. Through their Search Labs initiative, they are testing out a beta version of their Generative Search – a likely competitor of ChatGPT.
Users still need to uplift their search skills. They need to understand that the quality of search results is heavily dependent on their search queries. Moreover, they must verify the information they are gathering from search results through other sources to avoid being spammed. It would be useful to use other search engines like Yahoo! and Bing for the same query. It will help them discover which search engine is delivering the most accurate results for the niche they are searching for.
Marketers have their work cut out for them in terms of ensuring that their website content is of highest quality; properly optimized for search engine crawling; not over-optimized through Alt tags that might lead to spamming; off-page SEO content is of good quality; and different kinds of content are properly optimized for better discoverability.
The website must meet the Core Web Vitals benchmarks; has an SSL certificate; well-defined and updated sitemap; and only the necessary JavaScript code and plugins. Focus on user journey for an optimal user experience of the website. In addition to having a strong on-page and off-page SEO, they must make sure that their website regularly updated, and all search engines are pinged for any changes.
Achieving all this and maintaining it is an ongoing, arduous, but necessary task. On the other side of this are measurable advantages of:
higher website rankings and increased website traffic which lead to better brand discoverability and awareness;
better user retention that improves brand awareness and builds trust; and
increased chances of conversion, which means more leads.
There is clearly a desirable sweet spot that sits at the intersection of tech companies, users, and marketers doing their bit that can lead to better and reliable search results. Google Search turned 25 years old recently. Online search is still in its prime and undoubtedly mature with emerging AI technology. If all stakeholders come together, reliable and user-friendly search is likely to happen sooner than later.
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