Surprising Search Patterns
Conventional wisdom says that search engines are a fundamentally unfair technology — favoring the most popular sites and helping them to become even more popular. This assumption, captured in the term “Googlearchy,” is now being challenged by researchers at Indiana University who have used real-life data to test it. Their results show that Web-surfing behavior isn’t as influenced by search-engine rankings as was previously thought.
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The researchers created two extreme Web-browsing models: a person who used only search engines to find content and a person who browsed without search engines, instead following links from one page to another. The researchers then compared these two models with real-life data about site traffic for Web pages and the number of links pointing to those pages.
They expected the real-world data to fall somewhere between the two extremes: targeted searching and haphazard surfing. Instead, it turned out that typical Web use — presumably a combination of searching and surfing — concentrated less on popular Web sites than either model had predicted. In other words, real-world Web searching does not fuel the Googlearchy nor does it keep less-popular sites from being found.
