Google creates a perceptual trick making us think it is working well, when in fact it performs very poorly. Most of us are wasting around one hour a day because of poor search.
Tampa BSides - Chef's Tour of Microsoft Security Adoption Framework (SAF)
Is google wasting your time
1. Is Google Wasting Your Time?
You could be spending more time on Google than you think
2. Firstly, some benefits
• Google helps us find things quickly
• Google helps us locate things easily
• Google provides us with information instantly
• Google provides apps to help run businesses
• Google is starting to understand us much more
• Where would we be without search engines anyway?
3. We don’t use Google well
• In the UK 90% of searches are three words or less
• Yet Google increases its accuracy the more words we use
• We spend more time searching because our initial search phrases are poor
• People do not spend enough time thinking about the best search words to use
4. Google is not as accurate as we think
• On average we only click on Google results 12.7% of the time*
• Google therefore has a failure rate of 87.3%
• This is worse than it was four years ago when accuracy was 48.55%
• http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/keyword-stats.html?date=2013-08-01
5. Google’s perceptual trick
• Because Google is fast we perceive “activity” that produces “results”
• Low intellectual demand tasks, such as search, that produce instant “results” appear to
us to be working, even if they are not
• Google rewards us every time with something interesting from every search we do
• That reward makes us think what we are doing is good
• As a result we become “blind” to the fact that most of the time it is inaccurate
6. Google wastes your time
• Each time you search, you have to re-search because of the inaccuracies
• Each search takes extra time
• Those regular, frequent episodes of search and re-search add up
• Google is wasting about one hour of your day, every day because of this
7. What is the solution?
• Think before you type – pause for a second or two
• Type search phrases of seven words or more
• Save search results so you do not have to repeat them – use a tool like Evernote
• Get to know Google’s advanced search tools
8. More help?
• For more advice on how you can boost your office productivity by using the Internet in
better ways, contact Graham Jones
• www.grahamjones.co.uk
• +44 118 336 9710
• graham@grahamjones.co.uk