How Much Time Do You Waste Searching for Information?

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 10^th 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?