Is Google So Hard To Find?

How difficult is it to perform a search on Google? Usability expert Jacob Nielsen posed this question in the March 17, 2008 edition of his weekly e-mail newsletter Alertbox.

Apparently the process of getting to the search engine -- not the act of performing the search itself -- was unattainable for 24% of the participants in Nielson's latest round of usability research. That's a big number.

So what happened? Were the users asked to type in the domain? If the testing was done recently this pesky little site may have been an issue. I would highly doubt that the participants had any knowledge about top-level-domains.

Nielson offers little information about how the study was conducted. The one point he did make was that his team was "recruiting above-average users, so the success rate across all Internet users is probably lower than our finding." Says Nielson:

On the one hand, 76% is a high success rate. On the other hand, getting to Google is a very simple task.

A VERY simple task. I recently wrote about Google's redesign of their advanced search page. In that post I said that most users don't fully understand how a search engine works in the first place.

The implications of this study could be huge. What does it mean for Web developers, designers, etc. if we learn that the average user still doesn't know how to use, for instance, the Web browser. If Google is so hard to find, what does it mean for the rest of us?

Google's Advanced Search Redesign Does Little For Average User

I'm always suprised when Google makes a change to an existing product. Maybe it's because of all the rumors that I've heard about how the search engine giant is a little cocky about how well they know their technology. Or maybe it's because I use their services so much that even the slightest modification rocks my world.

That was what it was like the other day when I went to use Google's Advanced Search. I wanted to do a site-specific search. When I got to the page I found that the entire page had been redesigned. "But why?" I thought. "They've moved everything around."

Then I looked at the page from a developer's standpoint. It is certainly cleaner. The old interface had so many fields and almost as many dropdowns. It looked like it could have been devised by the IRS.

It turns out that Google was targeting that interface with the redesign. According to the Google Operating System blog, "Google's Daniel Russell said that 50% of the people who open the Advanced Search page leave it without completing the search." Russell apparently hinted that the exits "most likely [are] because they [the users] are overwhelmed by the Advanced Search interface."

If you ask me, though, Google didn't take this redesign far enough. Yes, cleaning up the interface was helpful. But who did it help? The 0.5% of users who already know how to use advanced search features. Sun Microsystems Director of Web Technologies Tim Bray says:

The people who do use Advanced Search are your most fanatical users, the professional librarians, spooks, and private investigators. And the ones who will do what it takes to find out everything about research on the rare disease their child just got diagnosed with (1).

The average user on the other hand, often doesn't fully understand how a search engine works in the first place. According to usability expert Jacob Nielsen, "many users don't understand how search engines prioritize their listings, and some users don't even know that the euphemistic label 'sponsored links' refers to paid advertisements.(2)."

Google has an Advanced Search Tips page, but I found instructions from a site called Google Guide to be much less intimidating and more hands-on for the beginner.

How can Google improve the usability on the Advanced Search page itself? I have a radical response to that question. But I'll blog more on that tomorrow.