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On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 8:50 PM, McLauchlan, Kevin
<Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com> wrote:
> Does anybody on the list RARELY(*)-but-sometimes search with Google,
> Yahoo or any of the other major engines and then actually look past the
> second page of results?
Depends on the level of desperation with which I'm searching for
information, and how badly the results have been gamed by SEO, but I
think it is more than 'rarely' that I go past the second page of
results. In recent weeks, I've even gone as far as page eight of
results, because I simply could not figure out how to refine my query
any more than I already had - and Google kept kicking up unwanted
results despite my including negatives ( -"unwanted term") in my
search.
> I wanted to say "EVER", but everybody who's ever used search engines has
> had to go through the learning curve of seeing how rapidly the useful
> results drop off, meaning that everybody has had to look a few times
> before deciding that:
Strangely enough, I found usable results up to about page 6 (the first
page was mostly unusable rubbish, it started getting useful around
page two). It started tapering off after that.
> A) There's not likely to be much useful stuff past the second page of a
> casual search and
Not always. Depending on the popularity of your search terms with SEO
specialists and people who want their site out there ahead of
everything else... the real meat you want could be on page 3 or later.
> B) If you want there to be something useful on later pages of results,
> you have to take time up front to craft a very particular and
> well-thought-out search with all sorts of terms and conditions.
Not always easy. I think most people tend to do this iteratively,
looking at page 1 of the results, and groaning "No, I didn't want
that!!" and adding negatives or grouping words into an exact string,
or other techniques intended to eliminate the bad results... then
repeating that till they start seeing useful results on page 1. If
people on this list do differently, I would be interested in learning
how :-)
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