My best friend’s son, Kyle, was recently diagnosed for an intrinsic brain stem glinoma. For the blissfully uninitiated, that means that he has an inoperable brain tumor. For once, I have something to obsess about that’s not soap or business related. So, I’ve spent copious amounts of time in the last five weeks searching, searching, and searching the ‘net for information, would-be cures, pediatric oncologists, pediatric neurosurgeons and the holy grail of a doctor that will try to operate on Kyle. I’m about 0 for 45 on that count. But, I keep searching and trying.
When I don’t find what I want, I switch terms, try the ” ” in different places or just plain skip to page 10 on the search engine and hope that it’s a better fit than the first 5 pages of non-hits. I never switch search engines. It turns out that I’m not alone in this. According to Convera, 93% of search engine users don’t switch to a new engine if they’re not getting the answer they want out of the first engine.
Why not? They’re different companies, with different algorithms. You would think that we’d all switch. But instead, we just bang our head against the same wall, but in a slightly different spot by trying to refine the search engine terms.
Only 10% of searchers find what they want on the first attempt. And only 21% of online searchers feel like their search engines understand the queries.
Well, duh. They’re computers, not humans. Of course they don’t “understand” your search engine query! But aside from that, artificial intelligence is supposed to be farther along than only getting 10% of our search engine queries right.
