[Sigia-l] Are web users more sophisticated

[Richard Wiggins]

This is one of my favorite quiz questions when speaking to audiences
about search:  "In the minutes after the planes hit the World Trade
Center towers on 9/11, thousands of people went to Google and searched
for CNN.  Was that behavior rational?"

It's surprising how many people think it wasn't rational.  In fact, it
was entirely reasonable; you know Google will give you the real CNN
site, and it's fewer keystrokes.  (Plus CNN was not responding at
times due to load, whereas Google was.)

I discussed this in an article in First Monday in October 2001:

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_10/wiggins/

Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News later described what he
called "the Google Effect" -- the notion that Google in some ways is
replacing the Domain Name System.

All of that said, often it is not intentional when people type an
entire domain into a search engine.  In anaylyzing search logs at a
few Big Ten schools, I found that if the search box is pre-filled with
the word "Search" one of the most common searches performed is for...
"Search".

/rich

Subir wrote:
> A couple of years ago there was a statistic published that as much as 60%
> of the users to the Yahoo portal went and typed in URLs in Yahoo's search
> box.