How Much Time Do You Waste Searching for Information?
March 14, 2009 |
I have just completed quite a lengthy presentation for a local event next week and have realized that even though the vast majority of the text I wrote for it was taken from the top of my head because my head already accumulates more information on the subject any single presentation could accommodate, I still spent the last 2 days mostly researching things like figures and images.
For example, I had to demonstrate some of my words with graphs and illustrations and the overall knowledge of the subject matter simply could not help here. And while I knew more or less well where I could find this or that particular piece of information (as I tend to remember the surveys I read even though I may not bookmark the link) and despite of the fact that I believe I know how to handle a web search right, I have just realized that I spent most of the time hunting for images and figures instead of doing actual writing.
As another proof of my words, I have just received results of an interesting survey with the main finding sounding absolutely terrifying: “Search engines are costing UK businesses over £4bn per year”. The explanation sounds quite logical: sales people using search engines for research on their targets and leads can take up to 11 hours a week longer than those using automated sales intelligence. All those hours that are spent inefficiently accumulate eventually the huge 4 billion of pounds in losses.
What’s more, the survey claims that even with all the extra time involved chances are you will never find the information you need: at least as many as 36% of surveyed employees admitted they never found what they were looking for using search engines.
The survey was commissioned by Artesian Solutions, manufacturer of automated search and surveillance solutions that are used by quite a number of prominent corporations like Siemens or Honda. Of course it is obvious that they have plenty of reasons to look for evidence of how much money their particular product can save to businesses – in order to sell more of such products eventually, of course. But now that I think of it I can’t help but agree: internet search is becoming too difficult of a task even if you know how to handle it right and only use the best search engines.
Lately I’ve been doing quite a lot of research on the Russian market when talking to a few software manufacturers willing to enter the local market and considering me as their local partner. Of course before I can make any promises of future sales I have to do my research well and collect all the information I can on the market size and local competitors. So I guess in the last few months I’ve been doing more web research than I’ve ever done even for Profy posts and now I know what frustration a search engine can get me in after browsing the 10th page of results still without finding what I am looking for.
Of course finding something simple is never a problem – you just type in a company’s name and you get the company’s website in the vast majority of the cases. But such simple cases are just part of everyone’s life and are as simple as they truly should be so no wonder they work just fine. But with more complex tasks things are really getting complicated (for me at least) and it takes several tweaks to the search query to get what I need.
Now that I think of it I realize that lately I’ve spent way too much time searching for things to read on a subject than actually doing the reading. It is certainly not up to me to decide where the reasons for the problem are as of course the best minds in IT are working on improving search technologies around the world and we have seen plenty of wonderful startups in the field but my guess is the vast majority of people still use Google or choose one of the other leaders like Yahoo or MSN for their search and have never migrated to any of the semantic search engines already launched. I personally have never liked any one of such startup enough to actually migrate myself so I prefer to stick to Google as usually it is reliable enough for me. But again, lately it’s getting more and more difficult to find what I’m looking for so I have some guesses about the reasons for why it is so.
My first idea is that internet is getting way too cluttered with content: everyone (me included) is so much willing to share our thoughts on each and every subject in the world that the world ends up with thousands of articles and blog posts, podcasts and videos on the same subject – and they all contain the same key words and are all indexed by all the search engines in the world. And of course it is quite logical that the more content, the harder it is to find something truly useful.
Besides, the special treatment that some search engines tend to be giving to blogs and other sites with regularly updated content (like our Twitter streams) can easily prevent us from finding a valuable book on the subject we are deeply interested in since the book does not appear until page 6 of the search results and you’ll have to ignore all the blog posts with all those crazy titles we tend to give them to catch eyes of potential visitors.
Of course this post is not intended to suggest that we all should just stop writing countless blog posts and only produce the content when we know it is totally unique and no one has ever written anything like this because we are the only experts in the field. After all, in this case the best idea is to just stop writing myself and never publish this post.
Being a part of the blogosphere myself I tend to think that every single opinion and perspective from every single blogger matters and can be important to understand something only that blogger can express. What’s more, I will stick to the opinion that the more opinions on the web – the better. But there is something truly broken with the way we now search for information and no matter how much we talk about innovations in search, we are still far from the perfect search technology. And for now as the volume of content is rapidly growing it is getting more and more difficult to find something actually useful. Or am I the only one feeling like this?
“there is something truly broken with the way we now search for information and no matter how much we talk about innovations in search, we are still far from the perfect search technology. And for now as the volume of content is rapidly growing it is getting more and more difficult to find something actually useful. Or am I the only one feeling like this?”
I’ve found keyword searching to be incredibly valuable: I still remember the days of Lycos and AltaVista, and I’m constantly surprised at Google’s ability to divine what I mean when I type in obscure phrases and keyword combinations. That said, there are two areas that searching fails for me, and winds up taking up a lot of my time: 1) image searches, particularly because I need to find images licensed in a specific way. Google and Flickr fail horrendously at this (Flickr a bit less so than Google due to its faceted search): I can easily spend 3-4x more time finding an appropriate image than writing the thing the image was intended to support.
2) When I have an idea I can’t distill down to a phrase or a set of keywords. Sometimes I have an idea that I don’t know how to implement, but it requires a long explanation to describe what I’m trying to do: it requires a lot of guessing as to what keywords might trigger the solution, or what phrase someone who has solved it has called the problem. Sometimes I get lucky, sometimes I don’t. To this problem, I wish they brought back paid Google Answers: the offerings for human-powered search are hilariously awful and powered by what appears to be 10 year olds obsessed with their changing bodies.
All worthy points, but I must be OLD…I remember pre-internet, and having to use the phone and the car to go to/though libraries to find info/data/documentation for my doctoral work. And an actual sabbatical to Alexandria. Egypt, etc. Some of the old ways are the best… Ah nostalgia!
Russel, I actually remember those days myself pretty well but I guess I just grow spoiled too rapidly and when something is good (like you can find something online instead of going to the library) I just begin to want more from it even more rapidly
Mark, thanks for the comments, I’m really glad it’s not my paranoia and you do happen to be in similar situations yourself. I have not mentioned image search in the post but that’s one of the most painful things in my life – I also use Flickr for it but it can take as much time or more than writing the post the image was intended for.
I have found that if you learn advanced Boolean query operators, things are much easier. However, it is unrealistic to expect 99% of people to learn this, just as it is unrealistic to expect 99% of the people to exercise 30 minutes a day.
Instead I have started to use Yauba http://www.yauba.com which purports to be the world’s first Privacy Safe search engine. I don’t care too much about privacy issues, but the search itself is very comprehensive and you do not need to know any search engine math.
Hi, Svetlana
I am searching information on the Web since the Web start.
Typically I use some tools to find related terms, e.g. http://www.visuwords.com or other dictionaries, e.g http://wordweb.info/.
I am carrying on Web research almost all my time and search is one the tools categories. But you should use and other tools and techniques.
You will find my collected ainforamtion about Web research (online research, Web clipping, note taking) tools and some tips on my blog http://zigmasb.wordpress.com
Best wishes
Zigmas
I think you are not the only people who spend more time try to find what you are really looking for,.however ,sometimes also in my purpose to find my targeted material and left into something irrelevant I also had found something “un expected as well,this what make me cant accused search engine for giving irrelevant result at there top listing,and more about this issue I found already Google relevant search http://www.googleguide.com/favorite_results.html that I usually use for “serious searching”and I think you need to check it your own to to try this
Hi, Svetlana
At the beginning I recommend to use both tools for selecting related terms, e.g. http://www.visuwords.com or wordweb.info and different search engines that enables to see related terms or topics, e.g. http://www.quintura.com, http://kartoo.com,http://clusty.com/, http://www.allplus.com, http://www.powerset.com etc.
You will find various Web research (online research, Web clipping, note taking) tools and some tips about search and research on my blog http://zigmasb.wordpress.com . Best wishes. Zigmas
I cannot send my comments
Hi, Svetlan
I propose to use a set of different search ebngines, You can find some tips on my blog http://zigmasb.wordpress.com. Best wishes.Zigmas
I don’t think Google is bad at all, in fact I think it is fantastic at what it does, i.e. keyword based searching. The problem for me is not necessarily the initial act of “finding” something it is what happens next. For example I have 5,000 things I need to search every day (customers, competitors, products etc.) and then I filter out the most relevant results and then I publish those results in an easily consumable form that I share with lots of people, therefore Google is not really a practical proposition for me. I think I would summarise this POV by saying that Google (and other public search engines) are tools, what I need is an application.
@sanderson: True, Boolean operators help a lot with complex requests but even they don’t make difficult search queries perfectly reliable. And without them it should be a complete nightmare. And since I’m not all that focused on privacy, I still stick to Google
Zigmas, thank you for the recommendations. In fact, all of these new tools are among those that don’t make me 100% happy. They can be helpful in various situations but they don’t make my experience better than what Google offers so I prefer to stick to it even though it is not perfect – simply because these new tools are not perfect either so what’s the point in migrating.
@borthers: What you describe sounds like a search engine integrated into a wiki – chances are something like this already exists or could exist via a simple integration of a couple of tools, especially since Google search is so easily integrated in just about everything.
Svetlana,
I stumbled on your post while I was doing research, coincidentally. Totally agree with you. As a working web copywriter I spend HOURS digging through sources, some good and many crumby. I’ve actually begun building my own list of research sources to try and relieve some of the wasted time. But also I think some of the concern with the amalgam of online sources is: reliability and the viralness of many statistics and data. We like to quickly follow the popular statistic du jour (unemployment, national debt, number of obese people in any major city….) with little concern for its origin, original intent, original stakeholders, etc. Thank you for making this case a valid one.
Jen, thank you for offering another proof that my concerns are actually valid ones. In fact, when doing research on certain topics I also prefer to use my own list of trusted sources before going for the general web search on Google so this is probably the only way for anyone who has to spend a lot of time researching for information on the web to reduce the time a little. I will not be surprised if we soon see a social network for copywriters to recommend trusted sources to each other
I’m not sure I will ever understand why blogs are so popular – with Google all they do clutter up search results making true research very difficult.
David: That’s exactly what I’m talking about and that’s why I’m not sure if I should just stop blogging myself to make Google search results less cluttered
LOL! Ahem…David, yes, there are massive numbers of blogs, however I’ve found some excellent sources — experts in their fields who blog — (since wer’re talking research) which I’ve seamlessly synthesized into my research. I believe most of the major citation sources have even modified their style guides to include these types of sources. “Blog” doesn’t have to be a bad word. We could complain about any number of esoteric online sources that are also sorted in Google. But to each his own.
David, I suppose that there is no one optimal way to search info for your problem solving, research etc. Google resulta is very large – lack of time to look at all. But blogs are useful as you can find the last (e.g. yesterday) info. You can use both social bookamrking and socila networsks and Twitter and Twine and FeedReader, eg. bloglines – I have collected about 50 RSS and each day I browse the. You can find some info about inforamtion retreival (not only search) at my blog http://zigmasb.wordpress.com. I propose to look at very interesting India knowledge system http://kreeo.c om as well.
Hi, I thought I was the only one who felt this way. Ha, I guess I feel a bit overwhelmed at times. Sometimes I feel “I don’t get it” and everyone else I know does. Great to see the recommendations on search tools, I will check some of these out. One thing that has helped me tremendously recently is Feedly. This is a Firefox add-on and what it does is it organizes all your Google Reader feeds into a much easier to use interface. It has many other features; I believe an integration with Twitter too. Anyway I like being able to scan my own saved sources first before going elsewhere. Oh yes, I forgot. Feedly also places your own sources at the top of Google search results pages.
LS: I guess we will soon have a club of people who suffer when doing a simple thing like conducting search online
And yes, Feedly is pretty useful, I use it myself though to me using a simple search in Google Reader itself usually works pretty well for this purpose anyway. And of course searching in your trusted sources first is usually a good option before venturing into the whole world wide web.
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